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BGonline.org Forums
Wisecarver Paradox: Middlegame position
Posted By: Jake Jacobs In Response To: Wisecarver Paradox: Middlegame position (Timothy Chow)
Date: Thursday, 7 August 2014, at 3:34 a.m.
Agreed, Timothy.
I have written about this elsewhere, but here is the genesis of the Wisecarver Paradox.
Dean Muench had begun working on his bearoff program in the late seventies. Timmy Wisecarver was rooming with my brother Munchkin in Vegas, and Dean gave Timmy a 500-page printout (old style, continuous, stacked paper with the white and green bands) of equities for positions that, I assume in retrospect, must have been one- and two-checker positions placed anywhere on the board, non-contact? I glanced through this when I lived in Vegas - we kept it in a kitchen cabinet - but wasn't interested enough at the time to nail down the parameters.
Timmy was diligently reading this monstrosity, and spotted the anomaly. He showed it to Danny, and the Wisecarver Paradox was born. We take much for granted now that we have powerful computers, but thirty-five years ago this was a real find.
It reminds me of the Holy Grail of bearoffs, Hugh Sconyers' database. Hugh made it available in 1997 or 1998. To that point Dean, Walter Trice, Larry Strommen, and Chuck Giallanza (and perhaps others?) had been working for years. I was in Vegas at a tournament, and told Chuck that Hugh had 15 x 15 solved, and he said: "Bullshit!" In a "I have Marshall McLuhan right here" moment, I spotted Hugh walking into the playing room, and called him over. "You have it?" Hugh confirmed that he did. "What did you run it on?" Chuck asked him. "A Sun workstation with two gig of RAM," Hugh told him. You could see Chuck's face fall. He had wanted the glory, but two gig of RAM? Nobody could come close to competing with that!
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