Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 05:31:13 12/23/05
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On December 23, 2005 at 07:01:00, Paul Jacobean Sacral wrote: >On December 23, 2005 at 06:28:28, Ryan B. wrote: > >>>Fabian gained nothing code wise being open source. The only change Toga made >>that Fabian also did was extending recaps in PV. > >I think is was more than that. Apart from PV node extensions, the only thing I can think about is futility pruning. However, futility pruning is a very simple and well known idea which has been known since more than ten years, and which is used in countless programs. It is completely trivial to implement, and the implementation in Fruit is different from the one in Toga. There is absolutely no doubt that Fabien would have tried futility pruning sooner or later, regardless of the fact that it was used in Toga slightly earlier. All the changes in Toga compared to Fruit are straightforward implementations of well known techniques (with the possible exception of PV node extensions, which I am not convinced help Fruit at all). Fabien, like everybody else, has been familiar with these techniques for years before they were implemented in Toga. He can easily implement things like this without consulting somebody else's code. The simple truth is that without Toga, Fruit would be almost exactly as strong as it is today (I would say a maximum of 10 Elo lower rating, and probably less), while Toga wouldn't exist at all without Fruit. I accept and respect that people consider Toga cool or interesting (though I personally don't find it interesting at all), but I really hate when people try to make it sound like Toga has been an important factor behind the rapid improvement of Fruit. In fact, I would wager that Fabien has learnt more from other open source programs than from Toga. There is always a lot more to learn from other people's programs than from a few dozen obvious lines of code added to your own program. Tord
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