Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 08:49:25 08/28/98
To Steven et al: The recent post of a friend here proposing an improvement of 100% with “only” fathering a chess program armed with two engines has made me think in how enough lay people -like myself and many more- fall once and again in the old sin to believe that what they does not know, then nobody knows. This does not happens in the commons and known areas of science where the college or university studies has learned us about the elementals, so we know we cannot discover them again. And what is beyond the elementals, we know it is stuff only for specialist to develop. But nowhere chess programming is taught, being more a craft than a science. So, apart from the smiths dedicated to it, nobody know nothing about it. Then, each time a smart layman fall in love with this field, he sooner or later confound his ignorance with a collective one and so also fall in the temptation to rediscover the wheel and the powder. We tend to think that our ignorance mirror a kind of waste land and very soon from that mistaken perspective we feel we can save the industry with a new, genial idea that is old like time. We does not perceive that it is of necessity that just any intelligent people that gives a thought to an area of knowledge is entitled to discover the elementals of it, or at least some of them. We don’t see that and so, amazed by our “intelligence”, we go in a rush to communicate the discovery to the world. Today is dual engines, tomorrow is piece tables, etc. Sometimes this is funny. In my university times, when Marxism was the fashion, I remember I tried to “refute” the Marxist theory of plusvalue and for that purpose I dedicate a full evening, lying in bed, to thing economic problem from scratch and then I wrote all that and I presented to my teacher, that laughed as a mad: what I have done, he told to me, was to rediscover the principles of Ricardian economy of the XVIII century, no more than that. And certainly with that I was not going to refute nothing. I was lucky enough that he gave me a good qualification after all. Not very differently is the behaviour of those here that once and again thinks in something so bright as to evaluate with that or this technique that is being applied since 1965. So, what can be done to avoid these silly mistakes from all us, non chess programmers? I propose to create a section, side by side with the poll, name “catalog of invented ideas” where real chess programmer with a minute or two to expend can go and write things like these: “dual engines exist since 1976 and the inventor was Mr.... It did not work...”. Or longer and more detailed accounts if they wish. At the end we, laymen, would have a long list of already invented ideas not to be reinvented again and in the process to look at it we could learn something. Even it may happen that armed in that way we could expend our energies to something really new and maybe become useful for the field. Fernando
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