Author: martin fierz
Date: 07:20:09 02/24/03
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>I always believed in the philosophy that pro's had more time and all so that >THEY led the 'development progress'. > >a) THen is it all tuning against the known amateurs that still professional >progs win in tournaments? Or what is the secret? I always read that they had >that bit of advantage and believed that bit meant innovations.However without >knowing them. writing a top chess program is very much a matter of 3 very time-consuming things IMO: 1) add a great opening book (remember shredder-fritz in IPCCC just now?) 2) get rid of all the bugs in your program 3) test and tune your evaluation and your search if two equally talented programmers who are familiar with all the "normal" techniques each write an engine but one of them has much more time for these 3 points, he will easily beat the other. all these three points are more about perspiration than inspiration... i remember an interview with stefan meyer-kahlen. asked what the main difference between amateurs and professionals was he replied something like "professionals test their programs better". another thing i remember is that when an amateur asked what he should do to improve his program, christophe theron replied something like "first of all, create a good testing method to measure the progress of your program". my personal reason for believing this is that my checkers program has improved very much over the years, and the progress is more due to the 3 points i listed than to any new things i learned about algorithms or programming. i'm not saying i never had any inspirations - i did. but that's not what made my program good... cheers martin
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