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Subject: Re: Where Do Chess Algorithms Come From?

Author: William H Rogers

Date: 11:33:53 02/12/04

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On February 12, 2004 at 14:03:49, Dann Corbit wrote:

>If you understood how the algorithm worked, you would be standing in admiration
>of it (as opposed to worship).  Making light of the algorithm is silly to me.
>The current alternative is minimax.

Hi Dan
I take a little exception with the statement that minimax is an alternative to
alpha-beta. They are the same thing just expressed a little differently.
As an example here are some of the steps I went through when I first started to
write my chess program.
First I designed the board, easy part. Then I started working on the move
generator. I designed and wrote a subroutine for moving pawns. Next I did the
same thing for the knights, then bishops, then rooks and by the time I started
to write the code for the queen I realized that last three subs were all the
same with just minor changes in the directions and number of moves that could be
made in each direction. I thought about it and came up with indices. One
subroutine used for all the major pieces with pointers to the direction and
steps indices. Tremendous savings in coding. Basically what I am saying is the
the minimax does not do anything any differently than alpha-beta, it is just a
more efficent and smaller coding that achieves the same results. Take one
program and only make changes to which one that you want to use and I think that
you will not see any difference in the evals or the moves chosen as best.
Respectfully
Bill




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