Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 13:10:17 08/11/99
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> In the computer chess world, Botwinnik was > a complete fraud. Well, it's true he didn't have a full blown program, much less a competitive one. He was probably too old to learn enough to do it himself, and the folks he got to help him weren't perhaps up to task and certainly didn't have an adequate hardware and software (did you see the fortran dumps in his book, it's a sad sight). But his ideas on multilayered control, interactions and job partition between layers, his field of play construct, etc are deep and farsighted ideas, well ahead of their time and the current levels of programming techniques. When I first read his book on his Pioneer project some years ago, it seemed like nonsense. But, the more I accumulated knowledge and ideas on chess programming, the better his vision looked. It's a kind of work which grows on you, as you revisit it over years. Obviously, someone entangled deeply with the latest game tree searching tricks, would not appreciate it, thus I am not surprised at the general reaction he received in the chess programming circles. Expecting otherwise would be like hoping that a kid flipping the burgers at McDonnalds would appreciate an advice from a world class French chef. He would say that the chef is a fraud in the fast food business. But the chess programming field evolves, too, and some day they and the hardware and the software technology will catch up with that kind of approach. Brute force can go only so far, even in such a tiny domain (relative to the real world) as chess playing. At least for the domain of chess, his work has mapped out a concrete and sound long term strategy how one might implement it.
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