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Subject: Re: The biggest failure of all times

Author: martin fierz

Date: 04:11:13 10/08/03

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On October 08, 2003 at 06:22:52, Daniel Clausen wrote:

>On October 08, 2003 at 04:02:33, martin fierz wrote:
>
>>
>>>The program was conceived by a Dutch engineer, namely myself,
>>>who thought maybe chess could be solved in a similar way
>>>as 4-in-a-row.
>>
>>4 in a row was solved by many different people by a simple brute force search.
>>do you really intend to do the same with chess?
>
>Just a small addition: There are also people (I think Viktor Allis is one of
>them) who solved 4-in-a-row with a lot of game-specific knowledge which solves
>_many_ positions very elegant. All he had to add was a search, which solved the
>rest. (which was _far_ from brute force) He wrote an interesting paper about
>that work, but I wouldn't be surprised if you (martin) read that already. :)

i think victor allis is the only one who did this (there is this program
"velena", but i think it's basically his engine rewritten, not quite sure
though) - yes, i am aware of his paper. the interesting question is whether it's
better to use this kind of knowledge-based approach or to use the brute-force
approach. AFAIK the two first independent solutions to C4 were by victor allis
and james d allen; both used roughly the same amount of computing time to solve
the game.

>Surely chess is a whole other story and whether similar (in nature)
>game-specific knowledge exists is at least questionable. It's not completely
>impossible though in my opinion - at least for certain end game types or similar
>things.

right, for certain endings it might be possible. but the focus of this
bookbuilder project is clearly not on that - in the helpfile it says somewhere
that it's really intended for openings only. i downloaded the trial version, and
from what i see i can imagine what vincent would say about it ;-)

cheers
  martin



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