Author: Graham Laight
Date: 03:07:45 10/30/98
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On October 29, 1998 at 22:31:51, Bruce Moreland wrote: >There are some products where new versions are demonstrably better than old >ones, or at least no worse, in every respect. > >A chess program is not an example of such a product. Chess programs are like >cats, they are not particularly predictable, and they odds that they will react >like you want them to are by no means high. You can make a very minor change to >a chess program and suddenly something that worked well no longer works as well. I've seen other programmers complain about this problem in the past as well. This is one of the key reasons why I think it would be useful to think about systematic ways of managing knowledge. I wish the CCC members were more open to discussing this. It is an area in AI (artificial intelligence) in which progress is being made. If one was programming a business application, then making the "rules" accessible to other programmers would be of high importance. I bet that most chess programmers cannot predict accurately the effects of the knowledge in their evaluation functions in various different positions - and especially the effects of lots of different types of knowledge working together! One day, I hope that someone will build a chess engine in which enthusiasts can put the knowledge in for themselves - and be able to predict how it will effect the evaluation in various types of position. Of course, programming chess this way might impact performance - the "God" of most programmers. > Of course, if you want to say that the change was good, you have to be able to >find something that the new version does better. > >A different version of a chess program, especially a very different version, >will find some shots faster than the old one, and some slower. > >bruce
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