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Subject: Re: definition of clones: Danchess an Crafty

Author: Bob Durrett

Date: 12:18:46 02/16/04

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On February 16, 2004 at 13:58:27, Robert Hyatt wrote:

<snip>

>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.

To really learn something it is not enough to read or listen to a general
lecture about it.  Instead, it is generally necessary to examine and carefully
study examples.  In the world of computer programming, that means examining and
studying code.  [Another way is to solve problems carefully selected by a
tutor.]  I never learned engineering skills by listening to or reading a
lecture.  It was the homework which taught me my skills.  Without study of
concrete examples, it is all a waste of time.

If I wanted to "take the plunge" and try to write my own chess program, I would
try to find open-source code which I could study and play with.  This does not
mean copying it into my new program and then marketing it.

Bob D.



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