Author: David Blackman
Date: 01:40:40 11/26/99
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On November 24, 1999 at 17:34:10, odell hall wrote: >Why so many crafty's on Icc? Hardly no fritzy's and commericials. Is it >because People don't like to run the programs manually? You could take a pent >233 and clean up all the crafty's on icc (expext for Crafty itself) using fritz >or chessmaster, this is why I can't understand this crafty craze. Perhaps it's >simply lazyness. Also why not winboard runs some of the commericials? What's the >politics involved? Do they have to have the programmers consent? How exactly >does the process work? My program has played on FICS on rare occasions, and running under Xboard was a lot more fun that running manually. Also if you play bullet or fast lightning manually you'll lose on time more often than not against automatic programs and a few of the fastest humans. Another reason is that some of these operators might have an interest in the programming side of computer chess but lack the skill, dedication, or bravery needed to write a whole program themselves. So you think a knight is really worth as much as a rook? You can probably find the right place in the Crafty sources in 5 minutes. 5 more more minutes and you've recompiled and you're back playing on the server to find out. You've thought of a wonderful way to do R=5 null move without missing anything important, but you want to test it a bit before you tell the world? It could take you anything from 5 minutes to a couple of days depending on how tricky it is. You wonder how good the results will be if a program drops a pawn in some random way sometime in the first 10 moves, but then plays the rest of the game well? Again it's probably not too hard to cripple Crafty in this way. (This is probably why Bob gets annoyed at people boasting that they beat a Crafty when it turns out it wasn't the "one true Crafty".) All of these would be difficult or impossible on the best selling commercial programs. A program that plays within a few hundred points of the best chess there is, and is debugged and ready for automatic play, and is available with full source code and reasonable comments, is a great resource for anyone who wants to hack computer chess just a bit without writing a whole program. (But writing your own program is more fun :-)
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