GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT
Years ago, when I worked in an automotive parts house, I had a customer come in and ask for a fuel filter. I looked it up for his vehicle, pulled it from the shelf, and when I brought it back to the counter he told me it was wrong, it didn ' t look right. When he described the appearance of what he wanted, I realized he wanted an air filter, not the fuel filter he ' d asked for. His reply?“ Don ' t get me what I asked for – get me what I want!”
There ' s an old computer programming term called“ GIGO”, which stands for“ garbage in, garbage out”. It ' s a reference to the fact that computers can only look for what you can tell them to look for; they can ' t make intuitive leaps as to what you may have actually meant instead. If you type the wrong thing in a search field, you ' ll get the wrong thing( or nothing) back from the computer. Garbage in, garbage out.
I remember a chess software customer of mine who reminded me of that old parts customer. I received a very irate phone call from this guy, angry that we ' d sold him a multi-million game database which, the customer claimed,“ contained no games by Bobby Fischer”. I asked him what he was typing in as a search term( figuring that he was using“ Bobby” instead of“ Robert”). No, came the reply, he was using“ Robert” as the first name – still no“ hits”. I smiled to myself and asked him to spell Bobby ' s last name.
“ F-i-s-h-e-r,” he said.“ There ' s your problem,” I told him,“ You spelled it wrong.”“ Well, it ' s a chess program – it should know what I want!”
Nope, sorry, it doesn ' t work that way. Besides, there actually is a“ Robert Fisher”( no“ c”) in my chess database; he competes in Australia and is rated in the 1800 Elo range. A piece of software can ' t figure out which guy you mean; it can only find what you ask for. And if I was actually looking for the games of that Australian player, I ' d be pretty hacked off if my chess program insisted that I wanted the ex-world champ ' s games instead. It ' d be like this one time when I went to a burger joint and specifically said that I didn ' t want cheese on my burger – and they kept giving me a cheeseburger.(“ No, you want cheese – cheese is good,” the woman at the grille kept insisting. True story.)
Making a long story short, you need to be careful when you ' re preparing a search. Make sure that everything is spelled correctly, names are capitalized, you ' ve used a capital letter and just two digits in an ECO code. Remember: if you put garbage in, you get garbage out.
123 chessking. com