[computer-go] Monte Carlo combined with minimax search

[steve uurtamo]

> Is there
> some inherent
> problem with memory management with Java or do all
> garbage collected
> languages suffer like java does from memory handling
> issues?   

GC will create slowdowns that you don't have any
control over -- even direct calls to the garbage
collector are handled on an advisory basis and
aren't guaranteed to cause anything to happen.

the nice think about malloc and free are that
you know exactly how much ram you're using and
can control when and how you allocate and free
it.  the picky thing is just making sure that
your complex structures all get freed correctly.
that tiny bit of extra work on your end is one
big thing that makes garbage collectors so slow.
they are not nearly as good about timing the
GC (even if they are sometimes better at figuring
out how to efficiently unravel your freed
structures).

i think that java is a great idea -- who wouldn't
want a cross-platform language with built-in
gui tools?  but to use the language the way that
it's intended to be used (i.e. using "new" without
fear of crippling your speed, creating complex
inheritance hierarchies), i don't think that
it's the right language for anything that needs
to go fast.

i like the idea of using high-level languages to
deal with meta-issues, and low-level languages to
implement things that would otherwise be painfully
slow.  who doesn't like to twiddle bits, anyway?
i think that it's just stylistically odd to
twiddle them inside a high-level language.  i
mean, in a language intended to be cross-platform,
what kind of knowledge do you have about, say,
memory alignment, anyway?  and if you do know
how memory is going to be aligned on the exact
machine class that the code is running on, why
would you use java?  equivalently useful tools
without all of the ancillary pain exist in much
faster language implementations.

s.

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