[computer-go] Remarks on the Indigo-Paper

[Chrilly]

>> I think you missed the point of Chrilly's post.
>
> that could be.  i think that i just come from a
> different background -- i'd reorder the priorities,
> is all.
>
My neighbour is a carpenter. A carpenter needs first of all the tools and an 
appropriate workshop. But I could stand for weeiks in this workshop and no 
reasonable product would be produced. One has of course to do something with 
the tools. But without the tools even my neighbour would not be able to 
produce something. I consider game programming also as a handcraft.
One can say, this is obvious. But I have not the feeling that it is in the 
academic world. E.g. if the Indigo team thinks that a reasonable UI is a 
waste of time.
Maybe this dates back to the origin of the academic world. Akademia was a 
garden in ancient Athens were the young-upper-class met, drank, had sex with 
each other and engaged in philosophy.  Symposium means "feast". The first 
point on the agenda in the symposium of Platon is: "Shall we drink today 
modestly, or till we are fully drunk?". They decided to drink this evening 
modestly, because they had drunken in the previous days too much, but at the 
end everybody lay around fully drunken. Besides the proletarian Sokrates who 
could drink more than the upper-class-boys.
Practical work, handcraft was for these people sklave-work which is below 
their dignity. I think this mentality is still present in the current 
academic world.

Interestingly such practical questions like a good GUI, database had a 
high-priority in the Swiss-Explorer project.

Chrilly

P.S.: dThe reactions would be interesting, if someone would put the original 
first point on the agenda of a modern symposium.