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Subject: Re: College Degree in Chess Programming?

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 10:38:51 10/29/02

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On October 29, 2002 at 13:01:54, Bob Durrett wrote:

>Available in near future?

I doubt it. Chess programming is an awfully narrow domain. How many chess
programmers are there world-wide? The world also doesn't have a great demand for
more. I don't think a university would do this because at most they might
attract one or two persons.

I also think it's ridiculous to compare chess programming to brain surgery.
There is a vital purpose for brain surgery in society, thus the acceptance of
such a narrow (actually quite broad, but narrow in the sense of "everything")
specialty.

Perhaps something more broad would be acceptable, such as a degree in CS, with a
minor (or masters, PhD, whatever) in artificial intelligence, which would cover
not only chess but go, other board games, as well as real time stuff. There's at
least an established market for these kinds of things in computer games (of
which chess is a tiny part), speech recognition software, image recognition,
etc. That degree could help contribute something, where a chess programming
degree probably isn't going to really contribute anything. Chess is just a
domain for exploring new ideas in AI, parallel search, or whatever your interest
is. Dr. Hyatt could have just as easily chosen checkers or go as his game of
choice.

BTW, where do you come up with this off the wall stuff? It's interesting, but I
wonder about you sometimes :)

Russell



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