Author: Uri Blass
Date: 13:37:52 12/30/02
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On December 30, 2002 at 16:26:31, Russell Reagan wrote: >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. There are common ideas but different people think about different ideas and there are cases that one person can know that other programs do not use some idea. One example: chessmaster solve mates faster than other programs and I am not talking about a small factor that can be explained by optimization so the programmer can know that his program use some different algorithm that other programmers do not use. Uri
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