Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 10:58:00 02/16/04
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On February 16, 2004 at 13:20:00, Steven Edwards wrote: >From: Robert Hyatt (hyatt@crafty.cis.uab.edu) >Subject: Re: Chess in LISP >Newsgroups: rec.games.chess.computer >Date: 1997/04/07 > >Stefan Hahndel (hahndel@informatik.tu-muenchen.de) wrote: > >: In article <5i4bpe$or0@juniper.cis.uab.edu>, hyatt@crafty.cis.uab.edu (Robert >Hyatt) writes: >: [...] >: |> Nope. for the humor impaired, or non-computer types, LISP is *not* the >: |> language of choice for a chess program. Hard to read. very slow. >: |> Interpreted, even on the old "lisp" machines that were built for a >: |> while... >: Dear Bob, >: why not ? >: You think only about a alpha-beta style chess program and brute force. >: Is really absolutely impossible that someone will write an "intelligent", >: knowledge-based (or some other approach) chess program in lisp in future ? > >no. but they will probably be using a computer that is powered by >electrical energy produced by a self-sustaining nuclear fusion reaction. > >:) Bob's old statement is, of course, dead wrong. Lisp is neither interpreted nor very slow. I know only one modern Common Lisp implementation which does not compile to machine code. Many of the compilers also produce excellent code, for many tasks the performance is comparable to C compilers. It is also not hard to read, if you have spent a minimum of time working with the language. I hope that I some day find the time to write a fast, conventional chess program in Lisp, just as a proof of concept. Erran Gat's old study comparing the performance of Lisp to C/C++ and Java for a simple programming task is getting rather old, but for those who haven't seen it, it is well worth reading: http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/home/gat/lisp-study.html Of course a study containing a bigger number of programming tasks would have been preferable, but at any rate just a superficial glance at the numbers should be enough to convince most people that it is not at all impossible to write fast programs in Lisp. For a particulary short, efficient and pretty Lisp solution to the problem, have a look at the following page: http://www.norvig.com/java-lisp.html Tord
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