Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 16:31:52 01/16/06
Go up one level in this thread
On January 14, 2006 at 15:06:07, Reinhard Scharnagl wrote: >On January 14, 2006 at 13:57:40, Janosch Zwerensky wrote: > >>> I think, that >>>freeware chess programs are dumping the whole scene, killing any respect and >>>refund of creative programmers. So I am very demotivated and now about to start >>>with programming the game of Go instead of improving the SMIRF chess program. There are a lot of very strong freeware chess engines available: http://rwbc.volker-pittlik.name/chronology.htm The progress of chess engines seems to be accelerating, despite their presence. In fact, the recent trends seems to have provoked a large spike. Also an engine with that name. Ironic? Yes, but not nearly so ironic as missing the irony would have been. >>Note that one of the strongest presently existing Go programs (GnuGo) is open >>source and freeware. Hence, if you feel demotivated by the existence of strong >>free open sourced chess programs, I tend to doubt whether moving to Go >>programming will help. > >Hi Janosch, > >well it is a hard job not to be misunderstood. I think that having OpenSource >projects participate in brainsport events is unfair, when a lot of people try >to compete by joined power with the work of single individuals. In Chess such >projects have reached the playing strength of masters, in Go there is still >sufficient distance between top players and programs to have some hope left. It is also unfair to read the work of others from a book then? The effort of GnuGo is much more than that for any chess engine. Look at the size of the project. It is ten times the size of Crafty, easily. I expect that if you want to surpass the work of GnuGo, it will be much harder than surpassing the effort of Fruit, for instance. >And of course, a lot of people are very satisfied patchworking foreign code >pieces into a strong engine. Adding some percent of (hopefully) own thoughts >seems to allow them then, to join their name to that result. I am not inter- >ested in such a sort of 'programming'. Some days ago I read about the dog- >picture-easteregg in PHP. Why could it take that long to be detected by all >those OpenSource 'programmers'?. It seems, that most people merely are copying >instead of understanding. Hardly that should be the purpose of OpenSource. There are also people who learn from what others did and then took their own original ideas and succeeded. In fact, all of the startling discoveries came in this way (Ruffian, Fruit, Rybka spring to mind). I find the work of Tord to be original and interesting. His engine is open source. If you are not able to compete with your own ideas, and you do not want to study someone else's ideas, then probably chess programming competition is not a good area. >It might be the view of some freeware 'customers' always to have the best chess >program available, not worrying at all about the sources, which might have been >included. But that should not be the perspective of creative programmers. I wonder what that statement referrs to? There are not any professional egines that have stolen code from open source engines, in my opinion. Some projects are clearly clones like Toga and the other Fruit Spin-off GambitFruit. But that is allowed by the license, and these programs would not be allowed to compete in major competitions because of their clone status. Nevertheless, these excellent strong clone engines enable people with very little money like college students to get a world class chess engine for nothing. I would say that this is a good thing and not a bad one. >I already have noticed, that this my opinion belongs to a minority. But that >does not take the right from me, to argue for that position. There is no need >to blame me for my viewpoint. In contrast to the joined forces of OpenSource >'programmers' this does not unfairly affect anyone else. Your opinion is as good as any, including mine.
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