Crafty development
edo
Mr. Hyatt, are you the sole person developing Crafty?
Do you get any help at all from other chess programmers?
How much help? Do people submit patches to you for consideration?
Can you please explain generally what kind of submissions/help
you get, if any, from others in developing Crafty?
I assume people email you re bugs, but I'm curious to know if
you have folks actually contributing code.
I have a hunch that a lot of people who diddle with your
code keep their innovations to themselves. It seems that
on one level the competitive nature of chess is antithetical
to the cooperation found with some open source projects.
Robert Hyatt
> You Know Who Asks:
> Mr. Hyatt, are you the sole person developing Crafty?
yes.
> Do you get any help at all from other chess programmers?
On occasion someone might submit changes, yes.
> How much help? Do people submit patches to you for consideration?
On rare occasions, yes. but it is not a significant amount of code,
compared to the overall size of the Crafty project...
> Can you please explain generally what kind of submissions/help
> you get, if any, from others in developing Crafty?
Some find bugs, where the code and comments don't seem to agree. They
send me a correction here and there, usually a couple of lines of code
that seem to be wrong. Sometimes I simply get comments "It doesn't
seem to understand this position" and I try to see if it is possible to
solve that...
> I assume people email you re bugs, but I'm curious to know if
> you have folks actually contributing code.
It has happened. IE Mike Byrne is doing some "personality code"
that will become a standard part of Crafty soon. Eugene Nalimov did
the endgame table stuff that most all chess programs are now using.
You can read through the comments in main.c to see where others have
sent ideas or actual code from time to time.
> I have a hunch that a lot of people who diddle with your
> code keep their innovations to themselves. It seems that
> on one level the competitive nature of chess is antithetical
> to the cooperation found with some open source projects.
I really didn't release the source to obligate others to help and
send me better code. I released it to show what a real chess engine
looks like inside, for those interested in starting their own chess
project... If I get stuff that helps, fine. If not, I just keep on
doing what I am doing. :)
--
Robert M. Hyatt, Ph.D. Computer and Information Sciences
hy...@uab.edu University of Alabama at Birmingham
(205) 934-2213 136A Campbell Hall
(205) 934-5473 FAX Birmingham, AL 35294-1170
matt -`;'-
"Robert Hyatt" <hy...@crafty.cis.uab.edu> wrote in message
news:brv5rg$k9p$2...@juniper.cis.uab.edu...
>
> It has happened. IE Mike Byrne is doing some "personality code"
> that will become a standard part of Crafty soon. Eugene Nalimov did
> the endgame table stuff that most all chess programs are now using.
> You can read through the comments in main.c to see where others have
> sent ideas or actual code from time to time.
>
tweaking the AI to play with a different style or strength. Thanks for your
work on Crafty, it is one of my fav chess programs. Is there a means to
create an opening book for Crafty? This would be a nice feature for people
who want to practice certain openings, especially unorthodox ones.
--
matt -`;'- mb...@alltel.net
Robert Hyatt
Yes, download crafty.doc (or one of its aliases such as the .ps
version if you can handle postscript). It explains exactly how to
do this and much more with the book.