Author: Don Dailey
Date: 11:43:53 01/13/99
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On January 13, 1999 at 05:17:22, Will Singleton wrote: >On January 12, 1999 at 17:04:10, KarinsDad wrote: > >>>Don, let me know when your individually created chess program canconsistently >>beat Deep Thought and I'll take back my words. > >Hmm, last time I checked, I didn't see anything about hardware design in the >CilkChess description. Has Don started burning proms? > >Couple of more points: a theoretical discussion is more interesting when the >idea under discussion has some probability of occurring. For example, what will >happen if a chess set is discovered on another planet? While this has very >little chance of happening, it has a greater chance than does this Microsoft >chess business. > >However, the question of team vs individual, leaving Microsoft out of it, is >pretty relevant for chess programming. Progress will almost always occur at a >faster rate when more than one person is working on a project, for several >reasons. For chess *engine* programming, the benefit probably tops out at two >people. Numerous examples abound from the literature. > >Don, haven't you always had a collaborator or two on your projects? CilkChess, >Socrates and Tech? Didn't you benefit from some of these colleagues? > >Will Absolutely. We have a guy working on the evaluation who is a master and will do a better job than I could by myself. We have also had a number of people finding speedups in the code that I missed. We have 3 gui interfaces and have a couple guys experimenting with Temporal Difference Learning. Aske Plaat has also contributed by improving our implementation of mtd(f). There is also another team of people who built the Cilk language. Cilk was actually built around the chess program, not the other way around so I would have to include the whole cilk development team too. Most of these team members are not chess experts, but will go on to be among the best in the world at whatever they do. But the bottleneck of the team is me. I get to spend very little time on Cilkchess and most of this time ends up being to organize these guys which is the best use of the time I have. But Cilkchess is a poor example since I am not a good example of a "complete chess programmer." I taught myself programming, was never better than a 1900 player in chess and just absorbed as many ideas as I could from others and tried to be logical and rational. A more complete chess programmer, would benefit less than I would from having a team of experts at his disposal because he would have less knowledge gaps (or expertise gaps) to overcome. It would be interesting for me to know how big the core teams of the top programs are. I'll bet that most of them have limited consultations other than a gui guy and some of them do their own gui's too. It seems that many teams also have someone doing the book which I'll admit can be a big help. - Don
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