Author: Miguel A. Ballicora
Date: 20:31:52 12/20/01
Go up one level in this thread
On December 20, 2001 at 21:15:42, Dann Corbit wrote: >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. Neither is Gaviota (a weak one), unless for some remote coincidence there is a resemblance since I have never studied Crafty sources or any other, because I am lazy. Yes, I pay attention to the comments and ideas of the people in this forum, but I have mine too. Over the time I found that I handle nullmove, recording the PVs and adjusting mate scores different. Ideas are also convergent, for instance the way I handle null move is conceptually similar to the way YACE does it (to avoid zugswang problems). The implementation is different. Some extensions and pruning ideas that I am doing occurred to me. Maybe they are not good, but they are Gaviota's. Maybe they have been tried before? Most probably... My point is that if I come up with my own stuff most of the best amateur for sure have their own ideas. It just come to my mind S. Jakob's algorithm for "locked" positions. Besides, the board representation is just a little part of the chess program. Is crafty a Darkthought clone? or a Chess 4.6 clone? Is Ferret a Gnuchess clone? Has LG, SOS, YACE and the strongest amateur engines any "clone" relationship with crafty? I do not think so. Regards, Miguel > >>>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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