Author: Ingo Althofer
Date: 23:12:04 09/09/02
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Helloa Martin,
thanks for your open reply, and sorry when you now feel like in a bashing sack.
That was not my intention.
On September 09, 2002 at 18:31:32, martin fierz wrote:
>you have to take the report as what it is: a very personal account of my
>experience in las vegas. it is not a scientific paper, more a casual write-down
>of my impressions during and right after the tournament. personally, i rather
>read honest accounts of what's going on in people's brains than reading some
>kind of censored version after the fact, and that's why i wrote it this way.
No problem with this - I like to do it just the same way (and from Jonathan
Schaeffer's book you know that he, too). Your report is really nice, and I
enjoyed it a lot.
I don't want to react on all the thoughtful follow-ups, but let me repeat my
main philosophy: To have done a thing first is worth more than to repeat it in
improved or refined ways.
Some examples from other games besides Checkers:
CHESS
The Deep Blue team was the first to beat the strongest human player.
Here some people would like to distinguish between Feng-Hsiung Hsu and his
colleagues on the one side and the ("bad blue") IBM company on the other. But
also IBM deserves honors. In 1989 they made a 3-years contract with Hsu,
Campbell, and Hoane with the understanding that within these three years
Kasparov would be beaten. This view turned out to be too optimistic - but IBM
payed the DB-group for another five years (and even longer).
CONNECT 4
The game was solved in 1988, independently by Allen and Allis.
Their programs had not been able to play the game perfectly in realtime, but
they were the first to compute its game-theoretic value.
MUEHLE (translated to "Mill" or "9 men's morris")
Ralph Gasser from ETH Zuerich solved the game in 1994.
Today the only available database for perfect play in Muehle is the one by Peter
Stahlhacke (with a nice user interface). But Ralph Gasser was the person who
solved Muehle.
By the way, Peter Stahlhacke is my student. The Muehle database was only a
starting point for his Ph.D. project. Traditional Muehle is a game with a very
broad drawing path, even broader than in Checkers. Peter's scientific task
(besides some others) is to invent and/or completely analyse variants of Muehle
which are more interesting than the original game, especially with respect to
the drawing crisis.
Alloahe,
Ingo.
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