Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 12:30:46 11/22/04
Go up one level in this thread
On November 22, 2004 at 11:59:22, Dan Honeycutt wrote: >I hear both sides. When I started grad school in 1972 I gained access to a >teletype machine hooked into the campus mainframe. You could enter a program in >BASIC, type run, and get instant answers. No more card decks and waiting >several hours wondering if your program was going to crash. The teletype >machine even had a paper tape that allowed you to save and reload your program. >Not a lot faster than typing it in from scratch, but less error prone. > >With such awesome computing facilities at my disposal I decided it would be fun >to write a chess program. With no forethought whatsoever I began: > >10 DIMENSION B(8, 8) > >"There, I've got a board". Needless to say, I didn't go far before I realized >that some planning and design would be necessary if the program was ever going >to actually play. I put the program aside and worked out an outline for what >various parts should do. When I returned to the program I was forced to throw >away a fair amount of code. > >Over the years I've developed my "style". I do a little planning - what the >program should look like at the top - and I begin coding the pieces at the >bottom. The plan grows down and the code grows up. If I plan too much I end up >throwing away plans as unexpected things surface as I code. If I code too much >I end up throwing away code for lack of a plan. I don't claim what I do is >best, but I'm comfortable with it and I know it works for me. Plus I'm too old >to change. > >It sounds like Daniel is proceeding in the manner that suits his style. His >style may also not be the best, but I believe it will work and he will succeed. >I think he deserves a little more encouragement and a little less "that's a >recipe for disaster". > >Good luck to you Daniel. > >Dan H. IMHO, The reason I think it is important to think a bit about parallel search is that you can go through designs faster. I discarded AT LEAST five designs on paper after I realized they wouldn't work/would be slow/etc. The point is that it took me 2-3 days of thinking about each design and realizing it would suck, rather than 2-3 months of implementing it, and then realizing that is sucked. However, I also was designing for a very different problem: N (well, reasonably small N) completely disassociated CPUs vs 2 tightly bound CPUs. Zappa contains a complete implementation of DTS (and _almost_ debugged for >2 CPUs :). Daniel is of course free to proceed in any matter he likes. I'll give him whatever advice he wants (although I won't tell him how my search works :), even if he doesn't take all of it. I'm not God; I don't have all the answers. I genuinely hope things work out for him; I'm not trying to hold him or anyone else back by raving about how difficult things are or cracking the whip to keep him drawing on paper for two months. anthony
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