Author: Uri Blass
Date: 12:56:26 03/15/04
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On March 15, 2004 at 15:34:07, Tord Romstad wrote: >On March 15, 2004 at 14:29:58, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>Well, the good news is that Steven's last name is not Botvinnik. :) I suspect >>that he will eventually produce something, unlike the "Pioneer" project that >>produced reams of promises and faked results... :) > >I haven't read any of Botvinnik's papers, but my impression is that his >contributions to computer chess are criticized more than he deserved. It >seems to me that he was a man far ahead of his time, inventing deep and >original ideas which nobody, not even Botvinnik himself, was able to >implement effectively at the time. > >Today, finally, two of the most interesting and rapidly improving chess >engines are based on Botvinnik's ideas. > >Tord I do not know. The problem is that nobody or almost nobody knew about clear defined ideas of botvinik that it is possible to try and to add to normal alphabeta(and the engines that you mean to are using normal alphabeta). I read about the botvinik extension(to extend repeated threat on the same target) only in the last year. I believe that there are programmers who thought indepentently on the same idea but if botvinik was really the first person to suggest it then he clearly did bad job in explaining it because I believe almost no programmer read about that idea before Sergei markof posted it here. I got the impression that botvinik ideas were not only some extensions to the normal alphabeta and I read in the past some article in hebrew about his ideas when I got the impression that botvinik simply did not define exactly what he wants. I understood that his ideas are suppsed to help programs to solve the Ba3 problem with a winning score in a very small number of nodes(not more than few hundreds) and I know of no program that can do it. Botvinik's ideas were supposed to help programs to be better than GM's not in the hardware of today but in old hardware of 1980 and I think that no program of today get close to that target. Uri
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