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Subject: Re: Fruit is based on Toga No

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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