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Subject: Re: List is NOT a Crafty clone, ... etc

Author: Álvaro Begué

Date: 13:10:09 08/21/04

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I think Paul Hunter's analysis of the code is pretty solid but, in case anyone
remains to be convinced that El Chinito is a clone of Crafty, let me tell you a
story.

During most of the year 2000 Eugenio Castillo and I worked together for a tiny
e-commerce startup (Ylos.com). The CEO of the company (Josep) was a computer
chess aficionado and he hired us in part because of the success of our chess
programs (my "Ruy-López" and Eugenio's "Eugen"). Josep encouraged us to start a
program together, and we both agreed. In our first meeting, I proposed we
selected a board representation and we started dividing the tasks for putting
together a first version. Eugenio didn't like the plan, and instead he insisted
in starting with Crafty as a base and then improve it using our best original
ideas. In particular, Ruy-López's evaluation function was pretty good, and Eugen
had a good implementation of the null-move quiescence algorithm (I think the
algorithm is originally Don Beal's). I refused to do that, and that was the end
of the project, as he wouldn't go through the trouble of writing a good base
program.

Actually, there is evidence that his program Eugen was a clone of GNU Chess. I
haven't seen the code personally, but other people have and came to that
conclusion.




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