Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 15:56:47 01/12/99
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Dear Don: Thanks for your kind words about my "artistry". Sure I would like they were fully truth :-) Respect your reasonning, I see in it some flaws because of your examples and perhaps, if you used them as mental models to create your own reasonning, that's the reason you are somewhat mistaken in this point. Let me explain: To produce a product is not the same to compete. You produce or can produce something adding things, efforts, etc. In fact, that's the esence to do something. To compete is to decide which product or perfomance or whatever is best according a criteria, so it is something enterily different. In the first case it is obvious some process of aditions can be -not neccesarily, but it can be- useful for the final product; in the second case it is obvious that not adition counts, but just comparison between isolated competitive elements. The fastest man of the world IS the fastest, no matter if all population of the earth compete against him. And so and so, including Gary againts all genuses of the world, including you and me :-) But if adition is the point, even the best guy in the world to use the showel cannot create a deepest hole as a million guys could do. Now, I think that a chess program cannot be catalogued as a piece of art and so programming cannot be catalogued as an artistic process. It is based in techniques that are known, that accumulates in times, that can be compared each other in terms of eficacy, etc. So chess programming approach a lot more to a clasic technnological enterprise AND THEN AND SO the addition process gets great importance, if not decisive. You cannot say that a Charly Parker jazz improvisation is "better" than one by Coleman Hakwkins, because a real work of art is something individual, uncomparable, valid in itself for ever. But of course you can compare between chess programs. CM2000 is not a piece of art valid forever, just a piece of software valid until a better one made of it a piece of obsolescence. Yes, some tech. enterprises can seems to be an art craft because the initial isolation of the creators, some fuzzyness of the techniques, etc, BUT that is not enough to think that will be the way to do things forever. I am sure that Curie was a talented man, but I am sure that sistematic work in any modern commercial laboratory produces tenfold more ideas and approaches that what weas done by Curie all his life. In this, sciences, it is matter of critical mass, specially when this "mass" is highly skilled people. Fernando
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