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Subject: Re: definition of clones: Danchess an Crafty

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 10:58:27 02/16/04

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On February 16, 2004 at 13:51:35, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On February 16, 2004 at 13:38:50, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>On February 16, 2004 at 13:22:56, Uri Blass wrote:
>[snip]
>>>It is important to make things clear because Dann Corbit in the winboard forum
>>>even suggested that it may be a bad idea to read crafty's code
>>
>>This doesn't make much sense to me.  I can't imagine a better way to learn about
>>the insides of a chess program than to look at the source, particularly when the
>>program is written like Crafty with about a 50-50 ratio of instructions to
>>comments.  If borrowing ideas was bad, then he might be right.  But you can look
>>at a program without borrowing source...
>
>If you are not allowed to apply what you learn, what is the purpose of reading
>it?


So, in your words, the only way you can apply what you learn is by copying
source code and pasting it into your own program?

Somehow I have figured out how to "learn" far better than that, myself.  I can
_listen_ to someone and learn without seeing a single line of anything I can
copy.  Somehow we are not communicating about the difference between "ideas" and
"source code".  I don't know how to make it any clearer than I already have.
You can read Slate's chapter in Chess Skill in Man and Machine, or my chapter in
Computers, Chess and Cognition, and then go off and write a chess program
without ever seeing one line of code.  Or you can look at the current Crafty
source which is way more up-to-date than any paper I might have written in the
past, and learn the same things.  _without_ copying any of the code.  IE my
comments in search.c explain Internal Iterative Deepening.  That's an idea.  My
code gives an implementation.  That's code.  They are not the same thing.



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