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Subject: Re: Please stop the bickering

Author: Amir Ban

Date: 15:33:14 10/29/99

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On October 29, 1999 at 16:59:20, Robert Hyatt wrote:


>9.  Singular extensions (I don't know what you do, but genius, wchess, and
>others have/do use these) came from deep thought developers Hsu and Campbell.
>

I talked with Kittinger in 1995. He didn't have SE then, and was skeptic if the
concept is right.


>the list goes on and on...
>
>
>>There is nothing special I have seen in the Crafty source code. Just the
>>basic things, well tuned and documented, but nothing special.
>
>No "special parallel search?"  Non-trivial to do.  Non-trivial to get right.
>etc.  no unusual evaluation terms?  Seems that _everybody_ suddenly decided
>that it was 'right' to probe in the search, not just at the root.  I've been
>doing it about as long as Bruce (he wrote his own tablebase code, while I used
>the Edwards stuff that was public.  Edwards was doing it before I was,
>obviously, as he wrote the probe code for Crafty.  Whether he probed exactly as
>I do today is another question.  But I notice that more and more commercial
>programs are doing that.  Where'd it come from?
>

It's obvious, but you need tablebases that are fast enough. That's the real
trick.

>
>
>>
>>And what do you expect people to do with your source code anyway then
>>to have a look at it? Isn't that the purpose?
>
>Sure...  but you guys don't get it.  Intel spends a year of secrecy to
>develop a new processor.  They spring it on the world, _and_ they publish
>papers describing _exactly_ what they did.  IE they get the lead-time to take
>advantage, but then the publish details that takes the entire industry forward.
>

It so happens I'm quite familiar with Intel, and there's no truth in what you
say. Intel will publish with a product anything that is needed to make you
comfortable using it and buying it. That's quite a lot, usually, but they won't
tell you anything beyond that.

One of the things Intel currently does is a strategic effort to reinvent PC
architectire from an open standard into something Intel-proprietary. The
so-called "firmware hub", e.g., will replace the old BIOS, and the LPC bus
replaces the ISA bus. The specifications are secret or restricted to Intel
partners. If Intel succeeds in this, competitors like AMD will have a real
problem.

Microsoft is doing something similar in the past few years. They made DOS into
the most successful OS ever by making it totally open and attracting third-party
developers, who really made DOS successful. Microsoft now thinks that those
third-party developers are a nuisance and they are closing many specifications.
For example, NTFS (the NT file-system) is not documented.

Amir



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