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Subject: Re: Symbolic: 40 goals

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 11:03:03 02/19/04

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On February 19, 2004 at 13:25:20, Steven Edwards wrote:

There was a study that showed people who write down their goals are extremely
likely to achieve them.

>Symbolic Project Goals (required):
>
>1. Produce a chess playing program in Lisp with assistance of C++ support of low
>level chess intrinsics.
>
>2. Portability (platform language independence): only ANSI C++ required.
>
>3. Portability (platform runtime independence): only a terminal emulator and
>POSIX conformance (including the pthread library).  Linux and OpenBSD are
>explicitly supported.

Why do you need a terminal emulator?  Pthreads are available for Win32.

>4. Portability (Lisp dialect independence): All chess specific intrinsics can be
>ported to a regular Common Lisp environment.
>
>5. Limitation of the seach node count to a mean of one thousand.  While this by
>itself is not a sufficient condition to prove human-like reasoning, it is a
>necessary one.

This restriction seems awfully arbitrary to me.  Why paint yourself into a
corner?  Suppose that you can be world champion by examination of 2000 nodes?

>6. Explicit and extensive use of pattern matching.
>
>7. Explicit and extensive use of planning.
>
>8. Natural language output including construction of a search narrative
>describing the reasoning used for a particular search.  This will constitute
>proof that the program is not just an interative A/B searcher in disguise.
>
>9. The capability to interactively replay the planning/search process.
>
>10. To perform a search with a mean time of less than one minute.

Why not aim for a standard time control.  Fixed time of one minute is extremly
unusual in actual game play.

>11. To operate on modest hardware such as a 400 MHz PPC with 256 MByte RAM and
>10 GByte disk.

By the time you are done, that will be a toy configuration.  In two years, PDA's
will normally come configures like that, so it is a laudable goal, I think.

>12. To be able to solve at least two thirds of the problems on some common EPD
>test suites.

This is too vague to be a meaningful goal.

>13. To incorporate the various CNS (Chess Notation Standards) specifications.
>
>14. To incorporate tablebases.
>
>15. To incorporate an extensive opening library.
>
>16. To be able to use an ANSI standard terminal emulator for a user interface.

Do you mean attach to the console or something else.  I hope you are not
planning to use curses or some other bletcherous monstrosity.

>17. To be able to use natural language spoken output on some platforms.

This is larger than the rest of the project put together.  Why inject this?

>18. To play in human events under standard USCF rules (dependent upon the
>availablity of USCF tournaments allowing program participation).
>
>19. To achieve a rating of at least 1800 Elo against humans (again, dependent
>upon the availablity of tournaments).
>
>20. Support for automated play against itself or against other programs where a
>suitable interface is available.
>
>
>Symbolic Project Goals (optional, long-term):
>
>1. To have an automated learning facility that incorporates persistant plan and
>pattern libraries.
>
>2. To have support for interactive tutoring of the program.
>
>3. To have support for interactive tutoring of the user.  This item has definite
>commercial possibilities.
>
>4. To be able to use natural language spoken input on some platforms (HAL 9000
>mode).

I think you may have bitten off more than you can chew here.

>5. To produce a QuickTime or MPEG movie of the details of a search.

That alone would be worth the price of admission.  I think that would be great
fun.

>6. To be able to solve at least nine tenths of the problems on some common EPD
>test suites.

If you name the test suites, then your goal will be more concrete.

>7. To play at master level (2200 Elo) or better (dependent upon the availablity
>of tournaments).
>
>8. To be able to intelligently annotate PGN game scores.  (Another commercial
>possibility.)

Define "intelliegently"

>9. To have search tunability that retains the mean search node count independent
>of platform speed or the time control.
>
>10. To be able to construct a predictive model of an opponent's play.
>
>11. To be able to pre-calculate and store opening plans and associate them with
>the opening library.
>
>12. Incorporation of a humorous praise/insult facility to amuse the user.

Yawn.

>13. To port the program (or most of its functionality) to a modest hand held
>device (e.g., my iPAQ).
>
>14. To support certain chess hardware peripherals (e.g., autosensing boards,
>robotic arms, clocks).
>
>15. To include a kibbutz facility.
>
>16. To include a GUI for Mac OS X.
>
>17. To include a GUI for X Windows.

There are lots of GUI systems already created.  What is the point of making
another one?  This goal also feels very "tacked on" to me.

>18. To produce a version in German.

If you use resource files, or a database to store menu and data items, then
others can do this work for you.

>19. To reduce the mean node count to under one hundred.

Capablanca only looked at one -- the best one.  Wink. ;-)

>20. To become World Champion.

Every chess programmer wishes for this.




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