Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 11:21:22 10/30/99
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On October 30, 1999 at 10:08:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>Go back to a 1990 ACM computer chess bulletin and note how many programs used
>null-move. It was already very common. I'll post a list on Monday as I have
>all of the ACM event publicity bulletins in a file in my office. In 1990 it
>had become a non-novelty (tournament applications at one point even asked
>null-move (Y/N)) when asking for details about an entrant. By 1995 it wasn't
>being asked. In fact, 1995 was the _last_ ACM event ever held. And the list
>of programs using null-move was already signficant before the JICCA article was
>published.
I would like to point out that Donninger's article was published in SEPTEMBER
1993 in the ICCA Journal. I have this issue in my hands.
Let me quote the first words of the article:
"At the 1991 Dutch championship, my program NIMZO played against QUEST by Frans
Morsch. QUEST and his twin brother FRITZ pull no punches in their weight class.
FRITZ, on a 486-PC, often searches to depths that can normally only be reached
by supercomputers (see, e.g., the game FRITZ-2 v. ZUGZWANG, Madrid 1992 (Friedel
and Valvo 1992)). FRITZ is a very compact program whose main ideas are inherited
from single-chip programs, so its evaluation function must be relatively simple.
Frans Morsch told me that he uses a null-move technique recursively (but, being
a professional programmer, he did not of course reveal the details)."
In fact Frans revealed almost everything to Christian with these little words
"null-move technique recursively"!
I would also like to add that I personnaly read the first paper on null-move in
the Jean Christophe WEILL Phd thesis (published in 1995 and available since then
on the Internet). In this thesis, WEILL makes an explicit reference to
Donninger's article, as well as Beal, Goetsch and Campbell papers.
May I point out that WEILL and BAUDOT are the authors of Virtual Chess?
Null move papers may have been published before, but access to these papers was
not easy. Actually many amateur chess programmers know about null-move thanks to
the following people:
* MORSCH (telling Donninger)
* DONNINGER (publishing a detailed paper in the ICCAJ)
* WEILL (publishing his Phd thesis on the internet)
* HYATT (publishing Crafty's source code)
These people made the null-move technique popular. That was the initial question
I think. It was not "who talked about the idea first" but "who made the
null-move so popular and widespread"?
There is no doubt in my mind about it. Every time we talk about null move we
refer to Donninger's article in the ICCAJ.
Christophe
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