12-18-05 - 1

12-18-05

One really annoying thing about doing the poker coding is that there's no community of code sharing. There are lots of poker-helper apps and AI's out there that people have developed, but they mostly guard their code like it's some secret trove of riches. I'm used to the game dev community where so many people are willing to help each other out. There aren't very many code communities where people are so open and helpful, game dev is really special in that way. It's just such a waste of effort for all of us to go through the same development problems and learn to tackle the same issues. You don't make progress that way. All of civilization is based on the fact that through sharing knowledge, we can start where our predecesors left off and go beyond them, rather than starting from scratch and just recreating their acheivements.

Part of the problem is that some of the code is semi-illegal if it interfaces with a poker host site. So that scares people about sharing it publicly.