Author: Andrew Williams
Date: 00:40:05 09/20/04
Go up one level in this thread
On September 19, 2004 at 19:32:26, Stuart Cracraft wrote: >On September 19, 2004 at 17:49:09, Andrew Williams wrote: > >>On September 19, 2004 at 17:28:47, Jon Dart wrote: >> >>>On September 19, 2004 at 15:18:47, Andrew Williams wrote: >>> >>>>That may be true, but I would reiterate that looking at its performance in WAC >>>>is not going to help Stuart much in improving it. I don't even think it will >>>>help much in improving its performance on other tactical tests, but that is just >>>>a guess. I would strongly re-state my point: to learn what is wrong with a chess >>>>program, it is better to play games than to test over and over on a test suite. >>>>Even testing over and over on several test suites is not a good idea, in my >>>>opinion. >>> >>>Test suites have some value. I'd add, that few programs are bug free. Finding >>>and fixing bugs is beneficial over the long run, even if in the short run such >>>fixes sometimes actually hurt performance. It is easy to have code that plays >>>legal chess and even wins games and still have it do horrible wrong things >>>internally--buffer overruns, memory corruption, you name it. That's why Arasan >>>has ridiculous amounts of optional debugging and assert checking code. I also >>>use Bounds Checker. >>> >> >>I'd certainly agree about the use of asserts (PM should have more and I should >>enable them more often in testing) and Bounds checking (I use valgrind, which is >>fantastic). I think of those things as finding bugs, rather than improving my >>program as such. So I wouldn't be looking at how many solutions I got, so much >>as whether any asserts failed or valgrind saw some problem. >> >>I *do* use test sets sometimes (and I like your Arasan suites a lot), but it's >>more for my amusement than because I think I'm going to learn anything >>particularly interesting. Perhaps I'm just using them wrong... >> >>Andrew > >I have zillions of asserts. I used them to do some heavy debugging about >1/2 of the time ago to the program inception in June. Those plus this board >got the jump up from about 160 out of 300 on WAC to 250/300. > >One of the exponents of program provability and advocate of asserts was >Bob Floyd at Stanford. He was my initial introduction to programming and >I remember the strong feelings he had about the subject. Bob has since >passed on, regrettably, but he left an enormous legacy. > >Here for some details: > > http://www.fact-index.com/r/ro/robert_floyd.html > >and here for his primary collaborator, Knuth, with thoughts about Bob: > >http://sigact.acm.org/floyd/ > > I've just read Knuth's appreciation of Floyd in full. Very interesting. Thanks. Andrew
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