THE ELEGANCE OF BRUTE FORCE part 1
THE ELEGANCE OF BRUTE FORCE part 1
In the early days of computing there were many competitors for the lead product. The Commodore machine was king in regards to numbers of owners. Commodore then followed up with a masterpiece of workmanship called the Amiga. The Computer was very efficient due to its management of resources. The PC for instance, does not multi-task in the technical sense though it does do a lot of things at once via the use of interrupts. In essence the PC wants pixels from the graphics chip, it makes a call directly to the graphics chip and gets them. It wants sound resources? It does the same with those chips. The Amiga was different in its management of resources in that it used a software solution to manage the various requests for resources and that was called Intuition. If the application wanted pixels it asked Intuition for them and intuition managed that along with the other applications request for resources. Thus, Amiga programs tended to have a unique-ness and economy that PC programs just could not have in their look the same brick-like stodgy world. The Amiga programs ruled over their PC counterparts in all areas of quality and functionality. In fact Atari and Apple (who always charged too much for their product unlike Atari and Commodore) were also superior to the PC in quality.
But that was only half the story. The two heads of the company were the opposites of their litigious and business efficient PC counterparts. Ali with his personal jets, mansions in many different countries and exorbitant taste for luxuries bankrupted Commodore and sent one of the greatest machines ever made to its grave. (With help from the competition-stifling and litigious Microsoft) Everyone was forced to go to the incompetent machine due to the above mentioned reasons and Microsoft’s’ brilliant codling of the business community. At first it was a depressing nightmare as the greatest computer and its best in the world applications slowly failed to get adequate support as its dwindling base could not reward the genius programmers that worked on it.
A lack of a wide enough software base, terrible marketing, weak support, and their world class awful management doomed the poor Amiga and made many people stick with inferior hardware so as to be compatible with their work environment with was dominated by the IBM systems and to a lesser extent the Macintosh.
Deluxe Paint (with its high quality introduction to animation), Can Do, The Toaster and what I think was one of the greatest pieces of software ever written; Bars and Pipes Professional were some of the reasons that underground Amiga supporters worked hard to keep the computer alive long after the Stores had to given up it.
Bars and Pipes Pro was a work in progress and it would reward many musical people to get to spend time working with this beautiful software. I worked mostly out of a hybrid interface (though later Todar Fay would start implement a musical staff and printing of that staff due to requests from people like your humble author who in those days could actually have contact with the brilliant software designers of the day) and demolished all competitors in design due to its extreme flexibility and absorption of the aggregate of all musical software products of the time. You could go in and work with notes as data points like with KCS (if you had that sort of patience) and was emulating the quality features of Deluxe Music as well. The thing that made this program so great was that in addition to all of the typical features you could go in and adjust and grab the notes as if they were clay in your hands. This was very important when working with the very difficult early samples of the tone generators of the time. (The modern ones as well could be difficult.) You could adjust everything the tiniest amount and approach it from many different angles. The uniqueness of Todars tools approach to score and track management was brilliant as well as most things he did. He was not in a deep way a musician as was evidenced by his confusion in the key and scale modes, which makes his accomplishments in this field even more impressive. I could go on even more about features of this software that over time gives more to you than you could imagine but this is about the death of such software and what replaced it.
At the time computer chess programs were coming of age. When the programs got just good enough to be intriguing but always bad enough to lose to you was the most fun of all. When you wanted difficult battle to toughen you up and occasionally lose you would turn up the computer full tilt and play open tactical positions. When you just wanted to win for sure with little effort you would just keep the position closed (not trade pawns to open ranks, files and diagonals) and build up force behind the lines where the forcing moves would not be in the horizon of the chess programs search engine. The computer was happy. And it became even happier if you had given it a pawn, so that it would willingly join in the position because it evaluated it as being OK. Then lines would open as you traded pawns and broke through and it would be too late for the computer. It was such days that made me brag that I would never lose a match to a computer in my life time.
But processor power slowly changed the landscape. As the computers became stronger there were less and less positions where you could control the tactics of the silicon monsters. Begrudgingly you would have to concede that it was equal to you, then better than you until the modern day Fritz, Crafty and other powerhouses would make you feel lucky to ever win a game. (Never mind the super computers that do battle with the world champions, there is no hope of ever winning for 99.99% of the worlds chess lovers) It was through Brute force that chess programs became elegant. They developed great judgment like humans had via calculation of immense amounts of data rather than “intuition”. Computers soon began teaching humans rather than the opposite.
Part two will show how the power of processing took mediocre hardware and made beautiful and elegant things happen in music. In fact the potential of what can be done today is not appreciated by many that will be shocked by what will unfold in the coming years. We hope to show a tiny bit of that in our writing.
In the early days of computing there were many competitors for the lead product. The Commodore machine was king in regards to numbers of owners. Commodore then followed up with a masterpiece of workmanship called the Amiga. The Computer was very efficient due to its management of resources. The PC for instance, does not multi-task in the technical sense though it does do a lot of things at once via the use of interrupts. In essence the PC wants pixels from the graphics chip, it makes a call directly to the graphics chip and gets them. It wants sound resources? It does the same with those chips. The Amiga was different in its management of resources in that it used a software solution to manage the various requests for resources and that was called Intuition. If the application wanted pixels it asked Intuition for them and intuition managed that along with the other applications request for resources. Thus, Amiga programs tended to have a unique-ness and economy that PC programs just could not have in their look the same brick-like stodgy world. The Amiga programs ruled over their PC counterparts in all areas of quality and functionality. In fact Atari and Apple (who always charged too much for their product unlike Atari and Commodore) were also superior to the PC in quality.
But that was only half the story. The two heads of the company were the opposites of their litigious and business efficient PC counterparts. Ali with his personal jets, mansions in many different countries and exorbitant taste for luxuries bankrupted Commodore and sent one of the greatest machines ever made to its grave. (With help from the competition-stifling and litigious Microsoft) Everyone was forced to go to the incompetent machine due to the above mentioned reasons and Microsoft’s’ brilliant codling of the business community. At first it was a depressing nightmare as the greatest computer and its best in the world applications slowly failed to get adequate support as its dwindling base could not reward the genius programmers that worked on it.
A lack of a wide enough software base, terrible marketing, weak support, and their world class awful management doomed the poor Amiga and made many people stick with inferior hardware so as to be compatible with their work environment with was dominated by the IBM systems and to a lesser extent the Macintosh.
Deluxe Paint (with its high quality introduction to animation), Can Do, The Toaster and what I think was one of the greatest pieces of software ever written; Bars and Pipes Professional were some of the reasons that underground Amiga supporters worked hard to keep the computer alive long after the Stores had to given up it.
Bars and Pipes Pro was a work in progress and it would reward many musical people to get to spend time working with this beautiful software. I worked mostly out of a hybrid interface (though later Todar Fay would start implement a musical staff and printing of that staff due to requests from people like your humble author who in those days could actually have contact with the brilliant software designers of the day) and demolished all competitors in design due to its extreme flexibility and absorption of the aggregate of all musical software products of the time. You could go in and work with notes as data points like with KCS (if you had that sort of patience) and was emulating the quality features of Deluxe Music as well. The thing that made this program so great was that in addition to all of the typical features you could go in and adjust and grab the notes as if they were clay in your hands. This was very important when working with the very difficult early samples of the tone generators of the time. (The modern ones as well could be difficult.) You could adjust everything the tiniest amount and approach it from many different angles. The uniqueness of Todars tools approach to score and track management was brilliant as well as most things he did. He was not in a deep way a musician as was evidenced by his confusion in the key and scale modes, which makes his accomplishments in this field even more impressive. I could go on even more about features of this software that over time gives more to you than you could imagine but this is about the death of such software and what replaced it.
At the time computer chess programs were coming of age. When the programs got just good enough to be intriguing but always bad enough to lose to you was the most fun of all. When you wanted difficult battle to toughen you up and occasionally lose you would turn up the computer full tilt and play open tactical positions. When you just wanted to win for sure with little effort you would just keep the position closed (not trade pawns to open ranks, files and diagonals) and build up force behind the lines where the forcing moves would not be in the horizon of the chess programs search engine. The computer was happy. And it became even happier if you had given it a pawn, so that it would willingly join in the position because it evaluated it as being OK. Then lines would open as you traded pawns and broke through and it would be too late for the computer. It was such days that made me brag that I would never lose a match to a computer in my life time.
But processor power slowly changed the landscape. As the computers became stronger there were less and less positions where you could control the tactics of the silicon monsters. Begrudgingly you would have to concede that it was equal to you, then better than you until the modern day Fritz, Crafty and other powerhouses would make you feel lucky to ever win a game. (Never mind the super computers that do battle with the world champions, there is no hope of ever winning for 99.99% of the worlds chess lovers) It was through Brute force that chess programs became elegant. They developed great judgment like humans had via calculation of immense amounts of data rather than “intuition”. Computers soon began teaching humans rather than the opposite.
Part two will show how the power of processing took mediocre hardware and made beautiful and elegant things happen in music. In fact the potential of what can be done today is not appreciated by many that will be shocked by what will unfold in the coming years. We hope to show a tiny bit of that in our writing.
posted by Steve Kusaba | 3:02 PM
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