Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 18:15:42 12/20/01
Go up one level in this thread
On December 20, 2001 at 17:07:05, Peter Berger wrote: >On December 20, 2001 at 14:04:24, Christophe Theron wrote: > >>120-150 amateur Winboard chess engines, 90%-95% of them being essentially >>partial Crafty clones (I mean using the same techniques, or only a subset of the >>same techniques). > >How do you know? Some Harry Potter trick ? Alorama. He's wrong, and I am very sure of that. The only crafty clones that I know of are Voyager, Bionic, and La Petite. Most bitboard programs don't resemble crafty very much. Beowulf is nothing like crafty, and neither are Pepito or Amy. The only thing that is the same is the bitboard representation. >>I know you love these engines, but I fail to see what they are doing for the >>general audience interest. >> > >Well - where did support of tablebases come from ? Book learning ? For tablebase files, I don't know if crafty was first. They were written a long time ago. >Or let's talk about the GUI and the features : are all the commercial providing >better stuff than what you can get for free ? Most freely available chess engines have no gui, and those that have one usually have a lame one. Winboard is a completely separate entity. >>They are great achievements by the programmers, and I would not deny that. I >>know how a programmer feels when its engine works and starts winning games. I >>have felt the same several years ago, so I know they are proud and they are >>rightly so. >> >>But I view them essentially as personal achievements. They will be a >>contribution to computer chess only if their author keeps on developping them >>for 5 to 10 more years and if they manage to achieve major performance boosts >>with NEW techniques. An achievement is an achievement whether it is recognized or not. To write a functional chess program is an achievement in my view. > >I think you are right with most of the very new developments. But there is a lot >in the amateur world that is original and not done by commercials so far. I know >about some things in Patzer for example or some things in Yace - and this is >only what _I_ know as a user ( it is safe to assume that we are talking about a >_very_ small subset of the real thing here) . I could try to babble about some >things done by Gerrit Reubold in Bringer, too. > >Why isn't it enough to be at the top ? Is it really necessary to discard the >efforts of others who can only afford to spend so much less time in their work ? The top commercial programs are better than the top amateur programs. The professional database systems are better than the amateur ones. But the gap is not wide and many people do innovate, apparently unseen by Christophe. As far as borrowing techniques -- Most chess programs will be an amalgamation of algorithms as described in various publications with a few original bits here and there. Surely that is also true of Chess Tiger (unless he invented Alpha/Beta, Nega-Scout, etc or whatever he is using to search with). I will go so far as to say that nearly all of the real innovation comes from the free programs. That's where we got alpha-beta and nega-scout and null move and hash tables and MTD(f) and all the other interesting chess techniques. The professional programs might learn a few new things but they will hide them for theirselves. Therefore, no generally useful innovation comes from the professional programs unless they should happen to publish their work. Two cent summary: The professional programs are clearly better. They always will be. All the innovation comes from the free programs (Nearly 100% of it).
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