Author: Dave Gomboc
Date: 08:06:25 04/16/99
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On April 16, 1999 at 03:35:51, Micheal Cummings wrote: > >On April 16, 1999 at 01:23:00, Dave Gomboc wrote: > >> >>This is IMO a poor way to assess greatness. Anyone with a B.Sc. in Mathematics >>today knows more calculus than Isaac Newton ever did, but that Isaac Newton was >>not a greater mathematician that most everyone with a B.Sc. in mathematics today >>would be a ludicrous statement indeed. >> >>Dave > >Greatness is in the eye of the beholder. >For example the guy last year in US baseball that hit a record of so many home >run, was taking a drug that in our football we consider performance enhancing >and so does the IOC which runs the olympics. > >We had a player who took the same drug, when he was caught was banned for two >years from the sport. So to the US he is a hero, to the other like me and the >rest of Aus he is nothing more than a drug cheat. > >So there are many way in which to talk about greatness of some people. Some may >hold more weight than others, whereas other do not. > >So when we talk about the greatest chess program, we are talking about the best >of the bunch. Not how it played some exciting games or did this and that. Just >that what is the best. > >Jesse Owens who did athelics held so many records, he was great in his day. But >he is not the best. He would not even make the semi finals of the 100m race >today. > >Isaac Newton was a poineer, great in his day, today he would be nothing. Alot of >great discoveries happened by accident to people that were in the right place at >the right time. There discoveries were great at that time. But as for the people >behind them, that is debatable. I said that Newton was a great mathematician, not that he was a great person! This discussion isn't too different from some chess ones, so I'll take the opportunity to move it closer to our club name. One could say that Paul Morphy was great for his time, but he'd be a patzer today. This is true, if you suddenly pop him into today's chess world, without any of the benefit of over 100 years of progress since then. But give him a year to catch up, and I think he'd be a lot better than B-class! When measuring "greatness" over several epochs, I think it's appropriate to simply compare people to the level of their peers at the time, because we can't (err, don't have the technology, yeah, that's it :-) perform time travel experiments on dead people. So Bobby Orr was still a great hockey player, even though Wayne Gretzky has taken over the record book. I reject the idea that Albert Einstein today would be nothing. Sometimes, people might be "in the right place at the right time". IMO, often they become great because at any moment in time there are some unsolved problems, and they make their place the right place. Though I realize that chess programs are (not yet ;) living entities, it is still possible to apply the same standard. To me, Chess 4.x is a huge program because of its repeated success throughout the 1970s. The legacy of understanding about how to write a chess program that was left behind by its authors is also very important. You can say "well, chess 4.5 running on a P-III 500 doesn't score well vs. any commercial product today". Sure, maybe so, but heck, it might even win if both programs were playing on the hardware Chess 4.x was written to use. And if all of a sudden you removed the understanding that Atkin and Slate imparted from the computer chess world, I think software today would be significantly weaker. Sure, someone else would have discovered what they did, but it would have taken time, and we would be that much "behind". Dave
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