[computer-go] Making Java much faster

[Chrilly]

I am confused. In your paper you write "Orego is a Monte CarloGo programm 
written in C++". Is Orego now in C++ or in Java or both?

The paper mentions the relative comparison of 2 versions. This is common 
practice in the scientific literature, but it is a very poor choice if one 
wants to measure the effect of a new method. The effects of changes is much 
more pronounced than against another opponet. A method which is good against 
the twin-brother must not be good against other opponents at all. Even 
against other opponents it happens frequently that a method works quite well 
against opponent A but it fails against B. Its relative easy to make a 
version which crashes e.g. Rybka, but this version is poor against Fritz and 
Shredder. The really difficult task is to find a combination which plays 
good against all.
But its of course a good method for papers where the authors want to proove 
how good their idea is. But it demonstrates the lack of competence of the 
academic world for game-programming. Otherwise such experiments would not be 
accepted as a proof for a concept. There is also Vincent Diepeveens law: In 
a weak programm is every change an improvement. I do not know how good Orego 
is, but playing e.g. against the top-3 programms would be a much better 
experiment.

This remark is not against the Orego team which does a fine job to explain 
their work. I like to read the Orego project "news".
Its against a very common and bad practice in papers. One can even get an 
award for the best paper of the year and become a standard reference with 
this poor methodology. In my "Null-Move" paper I did the same. The Null-Move 
Version of Nimzo was running on a 386, the Non-Null-Move Version on a 486 
and the result was about equal. My conclusion was: The Null-Move is worth 
one hardware generation. At that time I was not really aware of the problem 
and the bad comparision was not on purpose. But the reviewer/editor of the 
ICCA-Journal should have insisted on better experiments. The only 
"improvements" he made was changing the original title from  "Null move and 
deep search: Selective search heuristics for. stupid chess programs"   to 
"obtuse chess programms". I know what a stupid programm is, but I do not 
know till today the meaning of "obtuse".

Chrilly