Author: Amir Ban
Date: 14:22:12 02/20/00
Go up one level in this thread
On February 20, 2000 at 14:49:58, Christophe Theron wrote: >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 You guys must be terribly bright. Well, actually, of course you are, but I have no idea what you are talking about. Writing a chess program from scratch in 24 hours or even a week doesn't make the slightest sense to me. I think if I lost all my sources and had to recode my program based on memory it would probably take me about 2 weeks to come up with a simplified but working version. I would need to build the basic data structures, code the move generation functions, code makemove and unmakemove, try to remember how this alphabeta worked and where I need to change the signs, work on the quiescence search, patch some simplified evaluation function (no hope of remembering even 10% of the real thing) and think out its internal data structures. Then work on game control structures, identify the terminal positions, do input & move parsing, and do some move and board display. Did I forget anything essential ? Probably, but I'll find this later when I start compiling and debugging, which will probably take a long time because I coded in a hurry. I expect the result to look quite unprofessional and to play rather weakly after only two weeks. If you want some fancy features like a working transposition table and an opening book, you'll have to give me an extra week. And all this is just to recode something that I already have and know well. If someone is merely a bright programmer but has to think out all these issues as he goes, how much do you expect this to take ? I think writing a chess program from scratch is certainly more than a student semester project, which takes a semester. I manage programmers on a daily basis, and I need to have a feeling for how long tasks will take them. I would not assign even my best programmer to write a working chess program in less than 3 months, and even that seems a bit ambitious. What am I missing ? Amir
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