Author: Uri Blass
Date: 12:49:30 08/15/05
I read the following comment: "It's easy to broke things in a complex system like a chess program and it's very dificult to discover bugs, they are likely not to be discovered with just a few days of testing." My opinion is that it is not correct. There may be changes that it is a big risk to do at the last moment without testing but at least some evaluation changes or implementing contempt factor can be done with no risk by good programmers. part of the test may be playing blitz games and if implementing the contempt factor does not cause problems in blitz games and give the expected result then the programmer can be almost sure that there is no problem with the new code. There is no need to use more than some hours of testing to get hundred of 1+0 time control games and if change in the evaluation did not cause problems in 1+0 time control games it will probably not cause problems also in longer time control(changes in the search seems to me something with bigger risk). Do you have examples that show that my opinion is wrong and changing things in the last moment cause problems in games inspite of the fact that no problem were discovered in tests. Note that I think that even changes in the move generator or in the search that seem more risky to me have probability of less than 1% to create problems if few hours of testing do not discover bugs in case that the programmer has good tools to detect bugs. What is your opinion? Is it risky to make changes in the last moment or is it only a problem of programmers who did not generate good tools to detect bugs and need to play many games at long time control for that purpose. Uri
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