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Subject: Re: Crafty - an amateur program?

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 10:40:56 02/10/99

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On February 09, 1999 at 13:49:26, Bo Persson wrote:

>On February 09, 1999 at 12:46:20, William H Rogers wrote:
>
>>By definination:
>>Deep Blue is an amateur.
>>It is not sold to the public.
>
>But the authors were paid for doing the job. So they must be professionals! :-)
>
>So it's a professional amateur program??

These are interesting questions.  If you think DB is amateur, I think it also
makes sense that a chess program developed by Microsoft is also an amateur, as
long as it hasn't made it to final release.

A question is whether DB was anything other than a research project, meaning,
could the thing ever be sold, but even if the answer is "no" it might not be a
big deal, especially in light of the fact that IBM used DB to sell computers.

I think that it is professional since the DB guys were receiving significant
income for chess programming work.

This is a confusing area though, and without much effort some amateurs look like
professionals, and some professionals look like amateurs.

I don't think it makes much sense to distinguish for awards.  It may make more
sense to distinguish for purposes of travel support, although the
amateur/professional distinction doesn't guarantee that someone who is doing a
chess program essentially as a hobby gets the money.

bruce



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