Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 09:54:51 10/29/99
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On October 29, 1999 at 02:34:23, Ed Schröder wrote: >>Posted by Robert Hyatt on October 28, 1999 at 21:39:17: >> >>I have been to them since they first started holding them. In the early 70's, >>we all talked. In the 80's, the 'research groups' talked, the commercial >>programmers 'lurked'. To see this, just take a gander through the JICCA, and >>see how many published articles you find by commercial programmers. >>Prepare to >>look long and hard. And prepare to find only a tidbit here and there that is >>5-6 years out of date. Compared to those of us doing this for fun... > >I am sorry to say but the only thing I found useful in the ICCA journal (for >Rebel) was an article how to implement the hash table and that was 10 years >ago. After being an ICCA member for 15 years and 60 magazines I would say >that ain't much. > >Your argument is in contradiction also. The MAIN improvement for nowadays >programs since 4-5 years comes from NULL-MOVE, right? This includes Crafty >as well. > >And who gave you null-move? > >Right, 2 commercial chess programmers :-) > > Sorry... but not even close. I have used null move since 1989, when Don Beal wrote the JICCA paper "Selective search without tears" which was a detailed description of the null-move approach". A bit more than 5 years if my math is right, and _not_ a commercial programmer. When we were getting ready (and I am not sure about the exact time) for an ACM event, Burton Wendrof pointed out this to me (I am not even sure it was in the JICCA now that I think about it) and sent me a copy. I added the code with 10 minutes work (I used R=1 to start with, Beal mentioned R=2, but it seemed unsafe to me at the time). Where does the 'commercial programmer' angle you mention come from? >>>Ever asked Chrilly Donninger about how he has implemented Null >>>Move? Ask him and he will tell you! > >>maybe he will, and maybe he won't. > >:-) > >Wasn't it Chrilly Donninger who made NULL-MOVE world famous in the ICCA >journal? Not to me. It was don beal. I was using null-move years before Chrilly's article. The "threat extension" he wrote about was new, I tried it, discarded it. Then found that he had decided it didn't work well and had also discarded it. But the original null-move article that got many of us started came From Don. > >NULL-MOVE gave every program who had not a decent selective search algorithm >an improvement of over 200 elo points and for some certainly more. That is not even close. I have run many tests with and without null move. The improvement (for many of my program versions) was 50-60. Not over 200. I believe that Bruce did a similar test with Ferret some time back. And I think he got a similar number. > >History of NULL-MOVE: >Inventor: Don Beal >Creator: Frans Morsch (commercial) >Publisher: Chrilly Donninger (commercial) What does "creator" mean? Beal had a program that used null move. Beal also published the algorithm. I don't follow. Why is not Beal the "publisher"? > >Please stop your bickering on commercials as you using the most powerful >idea since times in Crafty yourself which came from 2 commercials. Sorry, but you are misinformed about the null-move origin. And way off on the time-frame. I would be happy to give you a host of authors to talk to. Murray Campbell and Tony Marsland wrote a good paper on null move that was published prior to 1990. Lachex, Cray Blitz, etc all used this. Larry Kaufman even had some test positions in 1993 that could recognize the form of null-move you were doing (R=1, R=2, recursive/non-recursive). > >About Crafty's source code, I have downloaded Crafty's source code twice >(version 9.xx and 16.6). I found nothing special I could use. Just to let >you know that not everybody is lurking your source code as you imply. > >Ed I can tell you pretty much exactly how many commercial vendors have downloaded crafty's source. ftp logs are sometimes interesting. And revealing. And some are pretty straightforward about telling me what they have used. IE fritz and its book learning code from crafty, etc.
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