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Subject: Re: What Happened To Crafty(C) Rating At ICC ?

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 13:44:54 03/18/04

Go up one level in this thread


On March 18, 2004 at 15:13:52, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On March 18, 2004 at 14:44:10, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On March 18, 2004 at 13:44:50, Tord Romstad wrote:
>>
>>>On March 18, 2004 at 10:45:37, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On March 18, 2004 at 02:16:24, Peter Skinner wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I am just throwing out ideas.. why does Crafty _seem_ to be behind so many now
>>>>>when before it was leagues ahead...
>>>>
>>>>secrets vs no-secrets is the main issue...
>>>
>>>If you compare Crafty to the top professional engines, you are certainly right.
>>>But I think Peter was referring to amateur engines.  In this case, I doubt that
>>>the secrets vs no-secrets issue has any great importance.  With the possible
>>>exception of Stefan Zipproth (Aristarch), I can't think of any amateur engine
>>>at all which appears to contain any important secrets.
>>
>>I think that this assumption is wrong.
>>
>>I believe that a lot of programmers have important secrets but their program is
>>weaker than Crafty because they did not get success in implementing basic stuff.
>
>When was the last time you asked some amateur programmer about some of
>the internals of the engine and didn't get a good answer?  I cannot recall
>a single instance when I have asked a question and the author refused
>to answer.
>
>Tord

I do not expect to get answer from most programmers about these questions so I
usually do not ask about the internal of other engines except engines that are
public source.

I know that there are a lot of prorammers who do not share their ideas(I do not
blame them).
I can add that I even did not try to implement most of my original ideas and I
decided that it is better if I first implement basic stuff correctly.

I need to implement hash tables correctly and to rewrite my alphabeta and to
implement book in a better way than my primitive book when it does not know
about tranpoisitions and does not do binary search to be able to find the move
quickly if I want to use a big book.

I know the algorithm to implement book but the problem is to implement it.
I wonder how did you start to think about that problem.
Did you start to read source code of free programs.

I tried to look at crafty's source code and gave up after an hour.

I understood that it has book_file and I also found that it generates it in the
first time in the bookup function but I did not understand how it is generated.
For some reason only opening the correct book file seem to be a lot of code.

I guess that I can understand it if I spend many hours on it but I do not like
to do it because it means that I do not make progress for a long time and
implementing hash correctly first is more important.

Uri



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