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Subject: Re: I Have Not Come Here to Bury Bob Hyatt

Author: David Blackman

Date: 22:14:10 03/29/99

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On March 26, 1999 at 12:04:15, Dann Corbit wrote:

>If you want to learn to write chess programs, I would suggest this sequence
>anyway:
>1.  Get Tom Kerrigan's TSCP:
>http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~kerrigat/tscp13.zip
>Study that until you understand it.
>
>2.  Get Dusan Dobes' Phalanx:
>ftp://ftp.math.muni.cz/pub/math/people/Dobes/
>Study that one also.
>
>3.  Then try Crafty.
>

I'd suggest step 1 TSCP is a good idea. But try to really understand it well,
including adding improvements of various kinds. Then scrap it and write a
completely new program of your own, from scratch. Don't try to copy crafty
bitboards. If you want bitboards, invent your own method. There is at least one
better method already in use, and further improvement should be possible. You'll
learn more by reading ideas from Bob (if we can persuade him to return) and all
the others programmers, and trying to implement them yourself, than from looking
at the code.

One problem is that good well tuned programs like Crafty are very hard to
improve. Another is that the "understand crafty" approach ignores alternative
methods that might seem quite promising, but don't easily fit in with crafty's
existing methods.



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