--- In [email protected], "Graham Toal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Palms are not big devices, in any sense.
The original Maven ran on a Mac with 1 MB of RAM, and the original Tyler ran on a PC with 512 KB. Size is not a limitation at all. Even today, you can produce genuinely cutting edge programs in only a few megabytes. By far the largest user of memory is the rack evaluation tables. If you have Quackle's exhaustive rack evaluation tables then you need many megabytes. But these aren't all that necessary; you can have a fantastic player with only a few hundred rack evaluation parameters. After the rack evaluators, the biggest expense is probably either the user interface or the dictionary. A GADDAG dictionary is about 2.5 MB, IIRC, and a DAWG is about 0.5 MB. Either should easily fit on any modern device -- even a cellphone. User interfaces tend to be expensive because the vendors supply code libraries that are many megabytes by themselves. But on small devices they are system shared libraries, so they don't really come out of your application's space. My guess: you can make Quackle run on nearly any device. You might have to trim the rack evaluator a bit. > What might be more productive could be to produce a web-based port of > Quackle, and access it via a wireless-enabled palm or a cellphone. I did a cellphone-based Scrabble product a while ago that used this strategy. It is still available, from EA Mobile. You might have licensing issues if you go that route. The real downside of using a Web service to distribute your AI is that you can't have CPU intensive activities. Certainly not simulations. Quackle might have to curtail its endgame player, too. For a PDA, IMO you should have an installed application. Cellphones are a different story, and the HTML approach works OK. Brian
