Author: Reinhard Scharnagl
Date: 01:09:22 08/28/04
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On August 28, 2004 at 03:52:40, Dann Corbit wrote: >On August 28, 2004 at 03:23:56, Reinhard Scharnagl wrote: > >>On August 27, 2004 at 22:53:04, Stuart Cracraft wrote: >> >>Hello Stúart, >> >>personally I try to avoid inspecting foreign chess program sources, because >>that only would corrupt one's ideas and phantasy. I claim that analysing chess >>program code from other people mostly would be counter productive and would >>give one no real benefit at all. >> >>There are exceptions, where special problems of a language like C++ would be >>discussed, but that mostly is independent from any chess know how. Of course >>there had been benefits and learning effects from such discussion threads. >> >>Creating a chess program by "patchworking" it from different sources hardly >>could be recognized as a success. Thus doing so can easyly lead to situations >>where such "recycled" code would appear as an "own" chess engine, frustrating >>and unfairly pushing back the elaborates of serious people. >> >>I cannot see, how the publishing of chess program sources especially as a full >>packet could produce any benefit. Instead it could be more helpful to publish >>articles or books on that theme but not including any compilable sources. >Sometimes looking at someone's implementation of an algorithm is much better >than reading about one. Especially when the algorithm in use is better than the >book version and it also contains all the work arounds for the "gotchas" This might depend on one's goals. It is not my goal to avoid weak own approaches which could be improved from time to time. If one has the goal to complete a good chess program gathering all foreign ideas one could get, things may change. As I have tried to explain, efforts to understand special algorithms should be ok for me (if not based on compilable source code). >I agree that a patchwork program is not going to do well. Having seen foreign code it is very hard to make secure avoiding this. >People do not help other programmers much. Look at all the open source chess >programs on SourceForge. Every single one of them has been rusting for quite a >while. That is a big indicator for me that publishing source code is not that helpful to the idea of fair chess programming (in numerous cases), but may targeting in maximizing one's personal image (where no one has heard from that person before). Regards, Reinhard.
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