Author: Peter Kasinski
Date: 13:11:47 02/18/99
Last May, I decided to write a chess program. A computer professional and a bona fide computer chess addict I always felt I ought to give it a shot. Surely some chess skills (currently 2263 on ICC) would help me, and who the hell are these guys who dominate the Swedish list anyway :-). I took TSCP as a starting point and after 3 months (after hours, such as life) I started to think of a name for my program. My code still had sections exactly as Tom left them (interface changed very little, for one), but I felt I had changed enough. Search was rewritten, move generation and q-search changed, null-move, hash tables, selective extensions, the works. At the time I received hints and answers form this forum. These helped me immensely. I also received direct pointers to Bob’s code (one email came from G. Mueller) which I thought was disappointing if only because of the assumption that I couldn’t think of it myself. But in reality I felt intimidated and discouraged by Crafty. It didn’t take long to realize that no satisfaction could come as a result of implanting this stuff into my program. I ended up coding a poor man’s hashing algorithm and hell it felt great. I took Pedestrian to ICC and (operating it manually) played some games. I was wiped by the Amateur but Will was nice and offered encouragement. My rating stayed around 2000 and given a LONG list of bugs and no endgame knowledge I knew I could improve it. When it called the Shirov mate-in-14 in under 60 seconds (PII-333) even my wife smiled. After the initial outburst of energy I took a break and didn’t do much in the last few months. Now with the Voyager case I don’t know if I want to anymore. Even before I thought of all these beginners who enter the list at stratospheric heights but somehow it didn’t turn me off as much as this recent affair. To me the idea that anyone could come up with Crafty as their first chess project is preposterous. How reassuring it was to listen to Amir (on Junior CD) saying that when he was around 17 he had thought about writing a chess program but decided that it might have been too difficult and wrote a mate-in-2 solver instead. I have tons of respect for Bob. But Crafty is not a realistic staring point for beginners. Bob’s contribution to our community can hardly be overstated, but I would rather read his answers than look at Crafty. On the other hand some people will use it to gain an unfair advantage over the very beginner it is supposed to help. PK. I would like to close with this suggestion for an opinion-poll question: What would be the rating of Crafty if Bob had access to the source code of Hiarcs 7 and CM6000 for, let’s say, 45 minutes?
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