[Haskell-beginners] sometimes Haskell isn't what you want

[Darren Grant]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 3:21 PM, Darren Grant <therealkludgy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This made me think that it could be much more effective to develop AI
>> in a functional language. There's no way I could do this with Haskell
>> presently as I am still struggling to approach all problems from the
>> FP perspective first, but I do think there is the potential.
>
> This reminds me of a paper on one of the early Go-playing programs -
> or more exactly, lessons learned from it. One of those was
> (paraphrased): "Don't maintain state. It's easier to recompute values
> from the board than correctly update the state information after a
> move." Every time I see a program going through grotesque gyrations to
> try and keep track of state I'm reminded of this.

Yea, and when the rules for the game change frequently, it is vital to
maintain composition.


Cheers,
Darren