What Keeps you Going

[jshriver]

Not sure if this is appropriate but it is geared toward developers. It took me nearly 10 years till I was knowledgeable enough to even write an xboard engine capable of playing legal chess. For those following all these years years olympus chess is in beta and finally able to play legal chess. Sadly yet happily very low.

For fellow programmers, what keeps you going?

For people like me passionate about the field, it's kind of obvious. Curious mostly about those veteran devs who have been in the field pre deep blue who continue to work hard afterwards. What keeps you ticking?

I plan to refine and work till I die, but admit from a programming/logic point of view there is few steps to be taken to make a social stance of significance. Especially against things like Computer Go which I'm also involved in.

Thanks for listening, and curious of your responses, especially as a crafty fanboy of Dr. Hyatts who inspired me to where I am today.

-Josh

[smrf]

Today I put less time into chess programming than before. Nevertheless it still is interesting for me to experience new (probably improved) data structures etc. and to proceed with an 8x8 and 10x8 FullChess supporting unified chess and Capablanca variants engine. Currently I am slowly developing "Octopus" using an approach having uncolored pieces, thus writing neutral routines. I hope that it will play also on Mac OS X someday ...

[bob]

Not sure if this is appropriate but it is geared toward developers. It took me nearly 10 years till I was knowledgeable enough to even write an xboard engine capable of playing legal chess. For those following all these years years olympus chess is in beta and finally able to play legal chess. Sadly yet happily very low.

For fellow programmers, what keeps you going?

For people like me passionate about the field, it's kind of obvious. Curious mostly about those veteran devs who have been in the field pre deep blue who continue to work hard afterwards. What keeps you ticking?

I plan to refine and work till I die, but admit from a programming/logic point of view there is few steps to be taken to make a social stance of significance. Especially against things like Computer Go which I'm also involved in.

Thanks for listening, and curious of your responses, especially as a crafty fanboy of Dr. Hyatts who inspired me to where I am today.

-Josh

I enjoy playing chess. I enjoy trying to improve Crafty. But most of all, I enjoy getting to do this on my own schedule, no commercial deadlines for the Christmas shopping season and such, no worry about where I finish in tournaments affecting sales numbers, etc. In short, it has been fun for 41 years now, and that has not changed (for me, anyway).

Almost forget an important issue. This is a type of development that makes you think, rather than write. Very much like some of my older O/S development projects. I don't enjoy trying to produce tons of lines of code. I more enjoy coming up with 10 lines to do something complex, even though it takes longer.

[Ron Murawski]

...olympus chess is in beta and finally able to play legal chess...

-Josh

Does this mean that you have renamed your unreleased engine from Goldentree to Olympus?

Ron

[Michael Sherwin]

Not sure if this is appropriate but it is geared toward developers. It took me nearly 10 years till I was knowledgeable enough to even write an xboard engine capable of playing legal chess. For those following all these years years olympus chess is in beta and finally able to play legal chess. Sadly yet happily very low.

For fellow programmers, what keeps you going?

For people like me passionate about the field, it's kind of obvious. Curious mostly about those veteran devs who have been in the field pre deep blue who continue to work hard afterwards. What keeps you ticking?

I plan to refine and work till I die, but admit from a programming/logic point of view there is few steps to be taken to make a social stance of significance. Especially against things like Computer Go which I'm also involved in.

Thanks for listening, and curious of your responses, especially as a crafty fanboy of Dr. Hyatts who inspired me to where I am today.

-Josh

You are ahead of me. It took me 23 years to learn enough to actually write a legal chess program. The results were Carnivor then RomiChess. The reason that 'Carnivor' only has 8 characters is because of the old dos restriction of 8 characters in a dos file name.

The question for me is what can stop a person from programming chess! For me at the moment and the last couple of years it has been because my mom has Alzheimer's and I am her only care giver. She is tearing the kitchen up even as I am writing this. So I will have to go. I guess that tearing the kitchen up is better than her putting toilet bowl cleaner on her face or spraying bug spray in her hair--she has done both. I tried at first to keep programming, but that was just an illusion as I have not made any real progress in the last two years.

[mjlef]

What keeps me going? Probably brain damage! Well, and it is fun trying to come up with new ideas. It is interesting to imagine an idea, then test it and see if it works.

[Fguy64]

It's a typical guy obsession. Some guys try to tweak a few more horsepower out of their souped up Ford. Some guys bust there ass trying to knock a few stokes off their Golf handicap. Some guys obsess about reducing their leaf nodes.

[bob]

It's a typical guy obsession. Some guys try to tweak a few more horsepower out of their souped up Ford. Some guys bust there ass trying to knock a few stokes off their Golf handicap. Some guys obsess about reducing their leaf nodes.

Some do all of those. Plus perhaps improving fingering on guitar chords, or trying to catch a few more fish, etc.

[Mark]

It's a typical guy obsession. Some guys try to tweak a few more horsepower out of their souped up Ford. Some guys bust there ass trying to knock a few stokes off their Golf handicap. Some guys obsess about reducing their leaf nodes.

Some do all of those. Plus perhaps improving fingering on guitar chords, or trying to catch a few more fish, etc.

Hi Bob- I've followed your posts since the days of RGCC, and you mentioned a lot of different hobbies over the years that you're involved in, like model airplanes, karate, etc. Care to share your top ten or so?

[bob]

It's a typical guy obsession. Some guys try to tweak a few more horsepower out of their souped up Ford. Some guys bust there ass trying to knock a few stokes off their Golf handicap. Some guys obsess about reducing their leaf nodes.

Some do all of those. Plus perhaps improving fingering on guitar chords, or trying to catch a few more fish, etc.

Hi Bob- I've followed your posts since the days of RGCC, and you mentioned a lot of different hobbies over the years that you're involved in, like model airplanes, karate, etc. Care to share your top ten or so?

Not in any particular order:

(1) computer chess (obviously)

(2) fishing

(3) hunting

(4) radio-controlled model airplanes (we have races, fun-flys, aerobatic competitions, etcl)

(5) hunting along with the related target shooting, etc.

(6) drag-racing (both cars and boats)

(7) Music (I play the guitar, accordion, keyboard, my teacher once said "player of all, master of none.")

(8) Do-it-yourself repairs from car, to carpentry, to brick-laying, to air conditioning, etc.

(9) camping

(10) still manage to water-ski every now and then.