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Subject: Re: Crafty - did it do more harm than good??

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 08:55:14 11/28/03

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On November 28, 2003 at 10:20:42, Rick Rice wrote:

>I feel that people really don't need anything more than TSCP to get started.
>After that, they should do their own theoretical research, to take their program
>to a higher level. Crafty hasn't really helped much, than promote plagiarism.
>Prof. Hyatt should do the chess programming community a favor by removing the
>source code from his web site. Instead, some articles by him about chess
>programming theory should suffice. This way, people will not be doing a
>wholesale cut-n-paste.
>

I guess you are the kind of person who must never leave their house because you
saw on the news that you might get hit by a car if you leave your house.

If no one ever shares, then no progress can occur. Imagine if each of us had to
spend decades reinventing the wheel for everything that was in Crafty. Most of
us would probably throw our hands up and quit, and the rest would probably fail
to discover a lot of neat things.

There are benefits to only describing a method and not giving source code, but
there are also great benefits to seeing real source code (not some trivial
example that would never be used in a real program).

It only takes one person to ruin everything for the group. Do you think we
should take down the internet because it allows for bad things? It does
significantly more good than bad, just like Crafty.

Personally, I have learned a lot from Crafty. I'm sure a lot of others have as
well. You only hear about the people who clone Crafty, but you don't hear about
all of the people who have benefited from it the right way. How many bad cases
have there been involving Crafty? Three? Four? Maybe even ten for all I know.
The number of people who have benefitted from it that you don't know about is
surely far, far greater than the handful who have used it incorrectly.

>Just my 2 cents worth. I could be wrong. What do you all think??

I think you're dead wrong.



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