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Subject: Re: What is Botvinnik's legacy to computer chess?

Author: Christophe Theron

Date: 11:49:58 02/20/00

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On February 20, 2000 at 10:01:46, blass uri wrote:

>On February 20, 2000 at 02:35:02, Bruce Moreland wrote:
>
>>On February 20, 2000 at 02:25:32, Eelco de Groot wrote:
>>
>>>Botvinnik worked for many years on his program Pioneer but had very poor
>>>hardware available to him in the USSR. It could solve some very difficult
>>>positions from Botwinnik's games but never reached the stage where it could play
>>>whole games as far as I know.
>>
>>The essence of intelligence is generalization, and the ability to generalize,
>>however poorly, is built into any chess program very early on.  Anyone can
>>create a program in under 24 hours that plays a complete game.
>
>
>I do not think that anyone can create a program in under 24 hours that plays a
>complete game of chess even if the task is only to choose a random move.


In 1987 I write the first version of my chess program for PC in one weekend. It
began to play games only a few hours after I started to work.

Of course I already had the experience of writting a chess program, but this one
was completely different from the one I had written before. Not the same
computer, not the same programming language, not the same basic data structures,
everything was different.

I think any experienced programmer, or even student, can create a chess program
in a very short time, and a program that can play reasonnable beginner's moves.

It actually happens all the time. Creating a chess program is a rather common
project in the universities. A smart student can read some thesis about the
subject and quickly write his own program.



>Maybe you are right about professional programmers but
>there are many people who do not know to create computer programs and many
>people are going to fail in the task of creating a chess program that play chess
>in under 24 hours even if they know something about programs but did only some
>simple programs of not more than some hundreds of lines.


Probably it's a difficult task for many people, but still it's doable and has
been done already by non-professionals.



    Christophe



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