Author: Ratko V Tomic
Date: 17:26:32 08/11/99
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> But speaking scientifically, what is high > value about something that is completely forged? For example, it is not so unusual that a graduate student forges data. That doesn't invalidate scientific work of his advisor, or the theory which the data confirmed. There are performance i results pressures, real experiments require eliminating lots of spurious effects which mask the one person is looking for, and some people just can't resist the shortcuts. Who actually faked Pioneer project results (if that actually happened), I don't know, it could have been any programmer on the project. Or it could have been even Botvinnik. After all, Mendel had faked results for his genetic inheritance experiments to get better agreement with his theory (which turned out to be a correct theory, it's just that in practice it was harder to confirm than he had patience for). To get funding scientists often exaggerate importance and sometimes even fake the results, or hand-pick data which fit better, not because they doubt their theory but because they cannot produce sufficently flashy results in a given time and given resources to attract the funding. In case of Botvinnik's chess programming ideas, I think the main value is that he had condensed, through the years of in depth introspection, the algorithms of his own chess thinking. Given his caliber as a player, his general intellect and the years he put in his efforts of analysing and reporting his own mental algorithms, his "core dump," as it were, is worth much more than what someone tells psychologist in an interview, or what a much weaker player can glimpse at in his own mind. I think that once somene manages to capture fully those mental algorithms in a program (which his programmers with their modest resources and/or capabilities have failed to do), this program will be so much ahead of the rest of chess programs and human players, it will be comical to watch them try playing against it.
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