Author: Jay Scott
Date: 14:49:05 07/31/02
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On July 30, 2002 at 22:43:36, James Swafford wrote: >why isn't >everyone doing it?? In my view, it's because top chess programmers are amazingly conservative. Or to look at it more positively, they have a lot of time invested in and knowledge gained about their traditional manual methods, and they do not believe in making big changes. It's hard to argue with success! Over the years I've posted a bunch of machine learning suggestions (few of them original to me) to rec.games.chess.computer and to this forum. Maybe it's my writing style or something, but in every single case the general first reaction was to ignore or dismiss the idea. That happened even when I pushed opening book learning, which was not used in chess programs at the time but has become common since. Arthur Samuels' classic checkers program already used a similar kind of rote learning, so nobody should call it a radical new idea, but despite seemingly obvious advantages it somehow took decades to show up in chess programs. Another problem is that many of the people who've played around with learning algorithms were only playing around. It takes serious knowledge to create a good learning program, and different serious knowledge to create a good playing program, and you have to have both to get really impressive results. Nobody's done it yet. My advice for those who have great new ideas: Implement them yourself and become a smashing success. *That's* convincing. The only problem is that to become a smashing success, you'll also have to implement a lot of great old ideas.
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