Author: Rolf Tueschen
Date: 16:55:28 09/10/02
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On September 10, 2002 at 03:24:13, martin fierz wrote: >and about your main philosophy, most of the times i would agree. The fact that in maths the right of the first has a concrete meaning. Because finding a necessary proof for some 'sentence' is important because prior to that nobody had found a proof. So far about maths and its proofs. For some proofs you can still get a million of dollars... But now to other sciences and applied departments. >but sometimes, >i do not agree. for example, i could argue that building the 8-piece db is not >really an achievement, because the only real achievement was to invent >retrograde analysis to compute such databases. all the rest was just using this >technique. or, if somebody gave me access to a blazingly fast computer with a >huge amount of ram, i could build the 10-piece checkers db and maybe beat >schaeffer to it. would that be an achievement? i don't think so! You are right. You were first but still not for a question of high importance or it must be a special difficulty caused by some principal obstacle you could overcome while working on the 10-piece task. But being first as such can't always have the same importance as in maths. It is said that in CC for the last two decades not very many innovations had been found but that the hardware was the most important factor. So, we can't applaude the one who mastered the new hardware as first with the same enthusiasm as in maths. Admiration is not a juridical term. In maths finding proofs has an internal logic and importance. In other sciences often the first who found revolutionary applications of a new invention is more admired than the one who made the discovery itself. Electricity as phenomenon and Edison as inventor of the light bulb is a good example. Of course sometimes there might me a debate about what is important. Must I state that I'm not teaching you personally at all but that I wanted to post this comment for the general debate. :) Rolf Tueschen awari has just >been solved by somebody who got incredible hardware to do it. you know, it's >good of course - but anybody who knows how to compute endgame databases could >have done that with that hardware. > >aloha > martin
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