Getting organized!?

The other day I was looking at a PHP tutorial and followed a couple of links and finally ended up on backpackit - quite a coincidence, since over the last couple of months I've been frustrated with how disorganized I am! I'm not sure yet whether this is the real solution, so: how do you organize your ideas, projects etc?

Open Office 2.0

Totally off-topic - or maybe not: Open Office 2.0 has been released. It's not quite as off-topic as it may seem: CheckerBoard is freeware, and so is Open Office. I'm always on the lookout for decent free software, and Open Office certainly belongs into this category (much more so than CheckerBoard). If you're tired of paying Micro$oft for annoying you with talking paper clips, try this!



While I'm at it: If you're looking for a decent program to create installations, try Inno Setup.

On my computers at home, I also use free antivirus software: Anti-Vir personal edition on my desktop computer and AVG free edition on the laptop. I haven't made up my mind as to which one is better.

When it comes to graphics, I use XnView.

I edit my website with Arachnophilia. But I'm not 100% satisfied with it - it's very no-frills, and you need to know your HTML to use it.

How about you? What free software works well for you? I'm only interested in productive software like the above, not in games like CheckerBoard :-)
If you know of a great free program (no NagWare or trial versions!), please add a comment!

Why a chess player programmed checkers

I'm a chess player. I learned the rules when I was five years old, joined a club when I was about 10 or 11 years old, and have been playing ever since. So why did I write a checkers program? I once tried to write a chess program when I was 17 or 18 - I failed miserably. After learning how to program a bit more seriously, I still didn't feel ready to write a chess program, and tried my hand at Connect Four instead. That's a game with very simple rules, and I learned all the basics of strategy game programming like alpha-beta pruning and hashtables there. Later on, when I felt a bit more familiar with the concepts of strategy game programming, I again wanted to write a chess program, but still didn't feel confident enough. So I wrote a checkers program although I had never played the game myself at all. The only reason that I chose checkers was that it was somewhere between Connect Four and chess in the complexity of its rules, and the fact that I read about the Tinsley-Chinook matches in time magazine. It may seem strange that a weak player can write a strong program, but in chess the same pattern has often been seen: the programmers of many strong programs like Shredder, Chess Genius, Chess Tiger etc are all quite weak players themselves.

The shuttle has landed!

Going completely off-topic, I watched the space shuttle land today. As a child, I was fascinated by rockets and spaceships and the like, and I still can remember quite well how I first read about the Challenger disaster: it was the headliner of the Swiss tabloid "Blick" that day. Later it became clear that the Challenger disaster was a direct consequence of managers overruling scientists and engineers, something which has lead to catastrophes before (e.g. Titanic) and afterwards (e.g. Chernobyl). Today, my fascination for manned space flight has disappeared; I tend to agree with the article A Rocket to Nowhere - there's not much point in sending humans into space. My interest in engineering problems however has increased, since I'm more of an engineer today than the physicist I was by training. Gregg Easterbrook's article from 1980 (before the first shuttle flight) has a nice description of the engineering tasks involved in building the space shuttle.

All of this has nothing at all to do with checkers, and I apologize for the digression. Except, perhaps, that my early fascination with space technology also lead to a fascination with computers - and that lead to CheckerBoard, many years later!

Aerosols instead of checkers

I've been working a lot lately; we are just finishing a protoype of a new device which measures particulate matter in the air - a form of air pollution. It's rather small and portable and sends its data over bluetooth to a PDA, the whole thing looks like this:

Because I'm working more than usual, I had no time lately for checkers programming. Two projects are ongoing, and I don't need to do anything about them: the book generators for regular checkers and for suicide checkers are both churning away on their respective computers. The generator for regular checkers is filling in the gaps in the newly merged huge opening book, a process which takes a lot of time. I guess that I'll be able to release the resulting book in about two months. I restarted the suicide checkers generator a few weeks ago, since Suicidal Cake now also has access to the 7-piece endgame database. After analyzing 46'000 positions, it still thinks that the game is a draw.

In 10 days, my holiday season starts, and hopefully I will be able to get back to cleaning up CheckerBoard's source code!

Innumeracy

This post seems quite unrelated to checkers programming (but it's not), but I can't help it - I just have to digress! Across the street from our house, a mobile phone company is planning to build a base station. Concerned citizens in the neighbourhood have already formed an anti-antenna interest group and are trying to prevent it. My neighbour, a 50-ish woman, asked me what I thought about it, and also told me that she had heard (at a meeting of this anti-antenna-group) that such an antenna was especially dangerous within a 46-meter radius. Because we live within this radius the woman was concerned.

I am constantly amazed at how little the general public understands about the basics of physics, or science as a whole. Our society is dominated more and more by ever-improving technology, but nobody understands it. You can claim ridiculous stuff - like that an antenna is dangerous within a certain radius, but not any more if you take one step further away from it, and people don't understand that this kind of reasoning is hogwash. If I had tried to explain to her that there was such a thing as ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, and what the difference is in terms of health hazards, I would have failed completely (If you really want to know about health issues and mobile phones, see the FAQ of John E. Moulder). This phenomenon I just observed is called innumeracy and is the much-overlooked but much more common cousin of illiteracy. I don't know if there is also such an in/il-term for not knowing any science. If there was, it would explain why people hold magnets in their hands for hours in the belief that this will cure them from some kind of disease; and also people would stop asking for proofs that something is safe. You can only prove that something (mobile phones, genetically engineered food, smoking etc) is not safe, never that it is safe.

You will ask: what has all of this got to do with checkers programming? It's quite simple: programming is sometimes called computer science, and when you write a checkers program and want to make it better, you have to make use of scientific methods. You need to devise methods to test your program, so that you can measure progress. You need to apply changes and either reject them or accept them on the basis of your test method. If you don't have the tools to test your program, and if you don't regularly test your changes, your program will not improve. I guess my neighbour will never write a good checkers program!

Nerd!

To develop a good game playing program, you probably have to be a bit of a nerd. I just tested my nerdiness and achieved the following:



How about you?