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=Quotes=
[[Jonathan Schaeffer]] in ''[http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-0-387-76575-4 One Jump Ahead]'' <ref>[[Jonathan Schaeffer]] ('''1997, 2009'''). ''[http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-0-387-76575-4 One Jump Ahead]''. 1. This Was Going to Be Easy, pp. 7</ref>:
My time at [[University of Waterloo|Waterloo ]] greatly benefited from the presence of [[Ron Hansen]]. He was author of [[Ribbit ]] (later called [[Treefrog]]), one of the strongest chess programs around. He generously gave me a copy of his program, which I used to learn how to write a chess program... Hansen's program was written in a computer programming language called [[Fortran]]. For my master's thesis, I translated it into the Z programming language (similar to the well known [[C ]] programming language).
Everything I read about chess programs convinced me that they were ignorant; they had little in the way of chess knowledge. Of course, since I knew a lot about chess, it would be a simple matter of translating my expertise into code and voilà, success! I spent a year working on the program, adding as much knowledge as I could to it. The new program, dubbed Planner, failed to live up to my performance expectations. Gradually my enthusiasm began to wave. The chess knowledge that I had added was simple because important concepts seemed hard to program. The machine required a precise specification but my chess knowledge was imprecise. Further, for every piece of knowledge that I added, there always seemed to be an endless stream of exceptions. This was going to be harder than I thought.
