The point, and it has been made before, is that chess is an easy game to program. I have no doubt whatever that I could put together a program within a couple of months which could whup you easily and I know almost nothing about pruning decision trees. If 'AI' folks from the seventies thought it was difficult, that was because the field was in its infancy and computers were orders of magnitude less powerful.
Edit: crosspost with The Rook. I'm pretty sure that you don't need to program opening books in order to make a chess program which plays 1800.
BTW. Checkers has been solved. The game is a draw.
Well, I was an 1800ish 30 years ago, I doubt I'm even a 1600 now, I may have trouble making it to 1500. I'm very happy that you can make a program that can beat me easily, that's wonderful for you. To be honest, it doesn't impress me because as you have pointed out, I'm so terrible that this means nothing.
But the computer programmers are interested in beating stronger players. I suspect that raw computation is the key, but I guess you think that the several million dollars that the computer companies spent on grandmasters trying to increase the playing abilities of these programs were a waste of money, right? They didn't help the program in any noticeable way? Or at all? Joel Benjamin and other strong grandmasters were hired, and I presume it wasn't to help them increase the speed of their computers. I talked to these GM's, they were being used to help the programmers with chess intuition. Your point is that all of this was useless? AND I talked to the programmers, who would talk a lot about how they improved from their search algorithms and how the hiring of the GM's was a key step for them. I suspect you will say they were lying to me to make me feel better? If typing in endgames and openings doesn't help, why did they do it?
And it is similar is Civ. Most of the 'general' population, not the small group on Civfantics, probably have trouble beating Noble. Even on Civfanatics, where we presumably have the best and most motivated players, most players play on noble, prince, and monarch. I doubt the people who can't beat prince or even noble are complaining too much about the poor AI.
Like chess, the AI 'problem' in Civ is for the small group of stronger players. And for chess, raw power wasn't enough for the IM's and GM's by itself. I don't know if it would be today, but I doubt it.
So, given that the actual people making chess computers found that hiring GM's was helpful, that writing in opening books helped, have written in endgame books, spent a lot of time and money on this, I'm going to make the leap of logic that they found these steps as helpful in increasing the strength of the programs in a noticeable way. If you don't, that's fine by me. I'm pointing out my view.
Here is a quote from Wikipedia, not a definitive source, but it is informative:
'Chess engines increase in playing strength each year. This is partly due to the increase in processing power that enables calculations to be made to ever greater depths in a given time. In addition, programming techniques have improved enabling the engines to be more selective in the lines that they analyse and to acquire a better positional understanding.'
So I'm sure that these people are wrong too ....
Best wishes,
Breunor