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Subject: Re: The Bickering Debate

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 06:42:26 11/01/99

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On November 01, 1999 at 08:40:01, Jari Huikari wrote:

>On October 31, 1999 at 11:53:49, Enrique Irazoqui wrote:
>
>>Were your beans depending on Crafty, you wouldn't be able to give your source.
>>This is, to me, the point that makes your position unrealistic when you demand
>>commercial programmers to reveal their findings.
>
>IMO: The commercial programmers could tell their findings. Not the latest,
>but those they have found some years ago. It's understandable that they
>won't reveal _everything_. But perhaps it would be possible to reveal some
>ideas without revealing too much? I don't know. (It's possible that they
>can't reveal anything because it could help other commercial programs.)
>
>					Jari

Suppose you would have found out nullmove. You earn because of that
a very good salary. Would you post it?

This fight can go on and on.

Personally i think we should debug some old ROMs and see that nullmove
was invented soon, but that a lot of small improvements slowly lead to
the way in which nullmove is implemented now.

Another improvement by me: double nullmove
now also gives it a correct implementation with respect to seeing
zugzwang.

So nullmove slowly evolved from rude forward pruning,
then quiescence threat detection, to last ply pruning using quiescencesearch
to depth decreased search replacement trick, to recursive nullmove,
to double nullmove.

In other words it's a grown up search mechanism now. Hard to say who is
first.

I read in a paper written by Wilkins about Paradise already something
that can be explained as the blueprint of the nullmove.

This article was in 1979 but very likely no one paid attention as Paradise
didn't win any tournament (it could not play games even).

Also it's not using the term nullmove... ...that word was still to be invented.

Hard to say who we should award this price. Must we award a price to someone
who officially publishes something inventing a new term? In that case
we can also give prices to some researchers who were talking in the
1999 Advances in computer games, but they invented something there out in the
east that is already known here in the west, as Ernst correctly mentioned
 already during a lecture of one of the poor dudes.

Must we award the one who first wrote down the idea, without giving it a new
name?

Must we award the one who first implemented it without describing it?
Hard questions.

Who invented Formula 1 cars?
The man who invented the car, the man who invented the gasolin engine,
the man who invented tires, or the man who wrote down the rules for
Formula 1, or someone else?

Greetings,
Vincent




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