Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 13:26:31 12/30/02
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On December 30, 2002 at 03:17:38, Martin Giepmans wrote: >Imagine a programmer who has worked for years to improve his >engine. He has discovered many ideas that Ed also discovered, >or similar ones. These ideas gave his engine an edge and >of course he has never revealed them to anyone. > >Then, one day he logges on to CCC and ... >How would this programmer feel? >Not too happy, I guess! The problem here is not with the Ed Schröders of the community. The problem is the large portion who don't share their ideas. If you don't share your idea, you get to think you're the only one doing it and believe that you have a "secret" advantage. The down side is that everyone independently solves the same problem and almost everyone wastes their time. If everyone shared their ideas, it would probably be ridiculously suprising how much farther advanced we would be. But it doesn't work if only one or two share their ideas. It's not a coincidence that there are more and more Crafty level engines on the scene than there used to be. But how many surpass Crafty convincingly? Not many. That's no coincidence either. Before long we will see more engines closer to Rebel's level, but few will pass it, because that requires thinking on your own. A different, but similar, situation happened this past semester in a unix class I was taking. We had labs to do involving solving various problems, writing scripts to accomplish certain tasks, and so on. My professor was an old school unix guy, and so we did a lot of the projects either in pairs or as a class, and I was amazed at how differently people solved the same problem. Many of the approaches people took are methods I never would have considered on my own. The result is that now I can look at a problem from many different angles and generally find a better solution. That wouldn't have happened if we never shared ideas.
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