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Subject: Re: new computer chess effort

Author: Greg Lindahl

Date: 10:56:19 12/16/99

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>Actually, while IBM is fairly clueless about chess, the DB team itself
>had a fair amount of chess savvy, and *hired* a top level player
>to give them advice on its play.

Then why did the Scientific American article (I think that's where it was) about
Deep Blue talk about how their team didn't have much chess savvy when they
started? And yes, I know they hired a Grand Master later on; I met him at the
SuperComputing '96 conference, where they had Deep Blue set up in the Carnegie
Museum of Art for a party. All I was doing was evoking the same image.

>Here are a few things to consider I think.

Lots of people are happy to give advice already; that's nice, but what I am
looking for are interested parties. I don't have the answers today; that's why
forming a team is the first order of business.

>2. As you no doubt know, message passing parallel systems are prone
>to subtle race condition

Not if designed properly. Parallel processing has grown up a lot in recent
years. I've worked on a distributed operating system (Legion) and am well versed
in such issues.

>3. Will the code produced be GPL?

That depends. If volunteers write it, they decide (as a group) and I expect
they'd go GPL. If someone hands me a distributed memory program right off the
bat, and it's commercial, then they will probably want to keep their property,
and of course that limits the ability or interest of volunteers to work on it.

>4. Since nobody want to donate work to a project that is doomed,

Chicken. Egg. Problem.

>expect
>people to want a lot of information about every little detail of this
>project before they offer to help.

There is no design yet, so I can't answer questions like "hey, is it possible to
build that FPGA?"

-- greg



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