Author: leonid
Date: 15:48:53 11/14/99
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On November 14, 1999 at 13:44:37, Bruce Moreland wrote: >On November 14, 1999 at 06:46:10, Bella Freud wrote: > >>I might also add that his "sharing" leads to underperformance as his competitors >>steal his ideas (parallel, bitboards) and return him nothing but abuse. >>Therefore any competent programmer will always be able to produce an end-product >>that is better than his Crafty. >> >>In my opinion the greatest attacks on Mr Hyatt come from commercial and wannabee >>commercial programmers who have benefited mostly from Mr Hyatt's code and ideas, >>but now want to distance themselves from the man himself in order to pretend to >>themselves that they did it "alone". > >These are interesting ideas but I don't think that they bear up. I think that >Bob has made a large contribution with his articles on Cray Blitz, and >techniques described in these are probably incorporated into many programs. >This is because these articles were early, and anyone who wanted to start a >chess program in the late '80s or early '90s encountered them if they did any >sort of literature search at all. > >The work with Crafty was not really popularlized until 1996 or so. Most of the >strong commercials were strong commercials by 1996, and there is no evidence >that I can see that any quantum jumps in strength came from Crafty, unless you >count the idea that a chess program should be a null-mover with end-point eval >and a chopped quiescent search, which is something that several of the ICC'ers >evolved towards simultaneously, and the most available example is Crafty. > >There are two ways you can build a strong program with help from Crafty. > >1) Eat the whole thing, the full-body transplant method. In this case you wind >up with a great wad of Bob and perhaps a few ideas of your own on top, which may >have some influence, but may have no influence. This is essentially a renamed >Crafty, and as such is not an original work, it's a direct copy. > >2) Read Crafty source as if it were an exceptionally long and well-written >article. You can get information about search mechanics, extensions, null-move, >evaluation terms, etc., and you can get some specific stuff. This can be of >much use, but it doesn't immediately follow that every new program will be as >good as Crafty based upon this. Anyone who views computer computer chess as a >personal challenge will still write their own program, will still have the >traditional two-ply search to start with, and will still suck for several months >if not longer. > >I think that Bob is an important guy, but it is not like if you read Bob's stuff >all of the work has been done for you. > >bruce Very like and appreciate Bob present here, but my question is the next one: How important is the theory created before us? How many games was basically created from scratch? And I speak about chess game. Do the hardware is more relevant to the all chess game business that ideas that existe and can be taken for free? If good chess game creation demand 5 or 6 years, two years of hard work (for somebody who wrote already few games) will be enough to invent all the major chess game magic "overnight". Leonid.
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