> After finding (yet another!) bug in my Havannah program I find myself > worrying about something that I suspect most of you have also pondered: > How many good ideas have I discarded not because the idea was bad but > because the implementation was?
Yes, and I don't think there are easy answers. In fact you can rephrase the problem as a game: * You have 10 ideas you want to try. * Use intuition (or heuristic of your choice) to sort them into most likely to be useful first. * You have 100 hours of development time. So, you spend 10 hours implementing and testing your first idea. It absolutely sucks. You now have the difficult choice: EXPLOITATION: assume the idea is good, and you have a bug (or it needs tweaking, or combining with another idea in order to shine, etc.) EXPLORATION: assume the idea genuinely sucks, throw it away and move to the next idea. Life: it's all just one big tree search. ;-) Darren -- Darren Cook, Software Researcher/Developer http://dcook.org/work/ (About me and my work) http://dcook.org/blogs.html (My blogs and articles) _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
