Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 10:53:17 10/19/97
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On October 19, 1997 at 10:54:34, Chris Whittington wrote: >So the point is that YOU and Bruce (and less so Fritz) are taking the >decision to try and massively alter the result of this event. You're >doing it under a screen of everybody else either does it or has done it >and nobody complained in the past and its all quite normal and and and >and infinitum; and in the past it was those terrible COMMERCIALS and >nobody complained, but now we are AMATEURS (with resources of course), >so its ok, and anyway AMATEURS are better than COMMERCIALS both in >terms of the programs and morality. There is nothing in the definition of an amateur that says you have to be poor, or have to take the event less seriously. And the only one who is spending money is me, apparently. The rest have managed to acquire free machines. I don't see the basis for criticism of this, I don't see why someone can be criticized for making a phone call that someone else didn't think to make. It was not unfair of these people to make this phone call, it was smart. It's not immoral to do this, either. This contest is the same this year as it was last year, and the year before, and they are treating it the same way they did in those years. If there is a problem with the competition, please offer some constructive suggestions and try to garner support for these. When I chose hardware for this event, I knew that I would have to do better than the supplied hardware. If I didn't do better, many others would, and they might do a lot better. My response was to upgrade my hardware. I have seen Dark Thought compete on Alphas for the previous two years, and I knew that Crafty got a good speedup on one (part of the problem with Dark Thought is that they have been very quiet in the past, although they have a web page now, so it has been hard to know exactly how much their Alpha helps then when compared to a PC), so I decided to do that. You discount the Dark Thought team for some reason. I do not. They have finished well the last two WMCCC's, and if I remember right they didn't do so bad at the WCCC either. And they scored this amazing coup this year by finding very fast hardware. I think that if they keep participating, they will win one of these, maybe this one. And I enjoy their selection of an alternate path (the Alpha), the same way that I enjoy yours (speculation). I still think this is mostly about the Alpha as compared with the PC. Last year I brought hardware that was even faster compared to the supplied machines, and if anyone criticized this, I didn't hear about it. The perception about the Alpha is that it isn't useful for anything other than extremely vertical applications. Since I have used the hardware, I don't see any reason why this should be the case, and I think that this is one reason that DEC is sponsoring people. >Its an open question whether assembler helps. I can recollect Bruce >commenting that C was better for coding, better for debugging and that's >why he used it. The portability issue is a more recent one that he has >brought up, but wasn't his stated reason last year. I did not adopt some secret "surprise porting" strategy. "I know, I'll use C to make my program portable, but say I use C because it's easier to write code and easier to debug it, but of course they'll ignore me because that just sounds like the same old broken record, but when a new machine comes out, 'wham', I'll hit them with -- portability!" I've tried assembly code. I know how to do it. I'm good at it. I couldn't get enough speedup to justify it, so I don't use it. But even if I did use it, I would also have the C in there with "#ifdef"'s, to retain portability and verify that the assembly code works properly. >Its 'fair' right now that we all run on roughly equivalent systems. Then >we, and joe public, can read something into the results. That's fair. > >Suppose you or Bruce win. What will that mean ? That you have the best >program ? No, not necessarily. Not necessarily at all. Of course not. It never means this. It didn't mean that last year, and it didn't mean it the year before, etc. You don't always win when you have the best hardware, and you don't always when you have the best program. bruce
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