18 days from SF4 release and about ~30+ ELO gain!

[JuLieN]

[moderation]
Removed a trollish post. Sorry for Don and Paul: as you replied to the post, your replies are gone with it.

[Don]

Although I cannot see this ever happening they could even in the future "close the sources" and keep the changes contributed and there is nothing you could do. They OWN the licence.

I think this is untrue. If you contribute to Stockfish you become a copyright holder. It is not necessary to explicitly claim copyright.

Being a copyright owner you can object to the closing of the source code (at least you may request that your contributions are removed first).

Don't let Don's capitalistic mind get the better of you. He is just jealous because Stockfish is getting stronger week by week for FREE! He charges for something that is weaker than it's free counterpart! SF team made a promise
something that greedy people don't get. SF team has honor! They said they will never charge for their work! Their work is real bytheway they use their own ideas and give it to the world for free! Now Marco and the team are bad people because they copyright they work. Marco "exploits" people for his FREE product! Get real! If they wanted they can strip Houdini, improve
it and sell it if they want to! So Don don't use your snake tongue to bad mouth SF team! You should be grateful! I bet you used some of the code from SF! Everybody does especially you commercial people on a dead line. SF is strong with good ideas inside. Even if they some day sell SF they would get my money and trophy for original work!

Everyone on this forum knows I am a huge fan and supporter of Stockfish so I have to conclude that you are having a bad day.

I just got this bizarre email from a pirate group for my praise of the Stockfish developers. Does anyone here disagree with my statement about the high quality of Stockfish code? I find this unbelievable, it ranks close the idea that I am a greedy capitalists for trying to support my family with computer chess.

[syzygy]

I just got this bizarre email from a pirate group for my praise of the Stockfish developers. Does anyone here disagree with my statement about the high quality of Stockfish code? I find this unbelievable, it ranks close the idea that I am a greedy capitalists for trying to support my family with computer chess.

You can praise as much as you want, but if at the same time you are spreading FUD regarding the legal implications of the GPL then it is very reasonable to criticise you for that.

Personally I don't see how your statements about the "high quality" of Stockfish can justify your completely false insinuations. Why don't you just retract those, instead of continuing to warn against non-existing dangers of open source?

Just in case you are honestly confused about the GPL: releasing code under the GPL does not equate to transferring the copyright to the FSF.

[Red Hood]

First i don't have a bad day and second you sure don't act like you support SF.

Just look at all my posts over the past 5 years and it will reveal the depth of your ignorance.

I advocated using Stockfish 4 as the canonical reference program to be preserved for future generations because it represents the strongest of the day (or at least among the very strongest) and it's open source.

I have stated many times about the superb scalability of Stockfish. Did you miss all of that or are you just opening your mouth without thinking - or are you just jumping to conclusions? I even once said that it may scale better than Komodo.

I congratulated the team for their awesome progress - maybe you didn't see that either?

I have stated POINT BLANK on may occasions that I am a big fan of Stockfish and that I have gotten more ideas from Stockfish than any of the Ippolit clones. Maybe you missed that too? Don't open your mouth unless you actually know what you are talking about.

In my opinion the Stockfish developers are the best software engineers in computer chess - way above Houdart (who is also an excellent engineer) and the really crappy Ippo stuff. Heaven knows how the Ippo team got that stuff working so well.

I think you have spoken out of turn, just opening your mouth based on an impulse that proved to be completely false. Don't worry - I do the same thing and I'm working on it. I just hope this doesn't represent your natural state.

I don't want to keep up this useless debate but you are really pushing my buttons but i'm gonna be the bigger man and end this. I also don't want to be accused of picking fight's and insulting members of this forum even though some of them deserve it. Anyhow SF team can defend them self's without me.

First i agree that SF team are good engineers, they deserve Nobel prize in computer science for their work. That's what we do agree on.

Now i will be short and clear because i don't want to flood this topic with useless stuff.

I have better business to do then to spend my time reading all the post you wrote in the past 5 years. I don't see the support you claim you are endorsing up on SF team. All i hear is splitting hairs and making accusations that SF team is currently doing this for free only so they can gather developers and after that betray them and use new ideas from the latter to make money i.e. go "closed source". Now saying that you support SF after that sentence is kinda hypocritical.

Greedy means something else then what you think it means. We have different views on that. I suggest you look in the dictionary about the meaning.

Making engines is a neat skill i have to say but hard work that is not. Only "original engine" developers deserve the right to make money or at least the developer who has made the best engine there is. With your skill's as a programmer i believe you can find a real job and support your self and your family. Anybody with decent programming skill can make an engine with today's open source culture and sell it.

I tried to be as short as possible. I'm done.

[Don]

First i don't have a bad day and second you sure don't act like you support SF.

Just look at all my posts over the past 5 years and it will reveal the depth of your ignorance.

I advocated using Stockfish 4 as the canonical reference program to be preserved for future generations because it represents the strongest of the day (or at least among the very strongest) and it's open source.

I have stated many times about the superb scalability of Stockfish. Did you miss all of that or are you just opening your mouth without thinking - or are you just jumping to conclusions? I even once said that it may scale better than Komodo.

I congratulated the team for their awesome progress - maybe you didn't see that either?

I have stated POINT BLANK on may occasions that I am a big fan of Stockfish and that I have gotten more ideas from Stockfish than any of the Ippolit clones. Maybe you missed that too? Don't open your mouth unless you actually know what you are talking about.

In my opinion the Stockfish developers are the best software engineers in computer chess - way above Houdart (who is also an excellent engineer) and the really crappy Ippo stuff. Heaven knows how the Ippo team got that stuff working so well.

I think you have spoken out of turn, just opening your mouth based on an impulse that proved to be completely false. Don't worry - I do the same thing and I'm working on it. I just hope this doesn't represent your natural state.

I don't want to keep up this useless debate but you are really pushing my buttons but i'm gonna be the bigger man and end this. I also don't want to be accused of picking fight's and insulting members of this forum even though some of them deserve it. Anyhow SF team can defend them self's without me.

First i agree that SF team are good engineers, they deserve Nobel prize in computer science for their work. That's what we do agree on.

Now i will be short and clear because i don't want to flood this topic with useless stuff.

I have better business to do then to spend my time reading all the post you wrote in the past 5 years. I don't see the support you claim you are endorsing up on SF team. All i hear is splitting hairs and making accusations that SF team is currently doing this for free only so they can gather developers and after that betray them and use new ideas from the latter to make money i.e. go "closed source". Now saying that you support SF after that sentence is kinda hypocritical.

Greedy means something else then what you think it means. We have different views on that. I suggest you look in the dictionary about the meaning.

Making engines is a neat skill i have to say but hard work that is not. Only "original engine" developers deserve the right to make money or at least the developer who has made the best engine there is. With your skill's as a programmer i believe you can find a real job and support your self and your family. Anybody with decent programming skill can make an engine with today's open source culture and sell it.

I tried to be as short as possible. I'm done.

You are putting a highly biased spin on this because you are assuming I have motives that I don't have. I guess you can read minds too?

You are obviously biased because you basically called me a greedy capitalist. If I don't spend thousands of hours writing software for free, I am greedy? It really shows how unbalanced you are.

[Uri Blass]

Note that my last patch that passed both stage I and stage II correct the problem but marco is going to test a simpler patch that helps to find Rb3 faster than the developement version but still in the order of 10 times slower relative to my patch(and it is not that my patch could help stockfish to find Rb3 faster than the best top programs so I do not feel that I extend too much).

Uri,

If your patch is good you can make it and distribute it and you don't need anyone's permission because that is granted by the licence. But it's still not your program no matter what you do. Anyone who works on GPL is working on software that is owned by someone else. It works great if you can live with that and it's a great way to collaborate on software as long as you understand it's not yours and that you are providing free labor for a common interest under someone else's control.

Although I cannot see this ever happening they could even in the future "close the sources" and keep the changes contributed and there is nothing you could do. They OWN the licence. They could not retroactively close already released sources of course but they would continue to hold the licence for those older sources. They are the ONLY ones who could close the sources and continue to work and update them.

For this project the GPL is mostly not even relevant unless you plan to fork. If you work on commercial software for a company and you are one of 100 different employees in a coding "sweat shop" it's no different, you are working for them, they own the software copyright and they own the software. It's a good arrangement because they pay you for doing it and/or you love doing it anyway and you accept that and it's even better if they pat you on the back for being a good employee.

I have in the past considered opening up software - but it's complicated. You cannot even by law FORCE your software to remain truly open and free - because you must maintain ownership to do that - and then it's restricted again. When a version of Robbolito came out with the missing licence it was immediately grabbed and the source closed and now we have Houdini. If something is free to do as you wish - it means you can claim it as your own - but then it's no longer free for others. So it seems that someone must always maintain legal ownership unless you don't care if that happens.

So the downside is that Stockfish is not free and even though it's a community project it doesn't belong to the community. Otherwise, why isn't your name listed when you type "uci"?

Here is a conundrum. Remember when Robbolito was released without a licence? What would have happened if someone had immediately slapped a GPL 2 licence on it? Would they suddenly become the new owner and licence holder? Could they have put their own name in the credits?

Note that my intuition tells me that if we want stockfish to be strong against weak opponents then we need to have less positions when stockfish is significantly weaker than them in tactics.

Maybe my intuition is wrong but my intuition tells me that the patch of not reducing dangerous moves has to be counter productive
if we test against opponents that are 200 elo weaker that is important for rating lists.

I think your intuition is wrong. All pruning is invalid by your argument because you can cherry pick many positions where the wrong move is pruned.

Komodo has occasionally been criticized for being tactically weak because we have taken favorably ELO trade-offs. But the key words here are "favorable" and "trade-off" and if you take a more relevant view what matters is what the program can actually see. If Stockfish is stronger due to some patch but appears to score less on a tactical problem set, it still means it's seeing more of what is relevant. It's not pragmatic to trade seeing more for seeing less just because it helps a small subset of positions. Of course some people want that - so for example Houdini has a tactical mode for people such as yourself who don't mind having a weaker program if it's more tactical.

Don

I did not claim that the patch of gary is not productive against stronger opponents and I talk specifically about beating opponents who are clearly weaker.

It is not about tactical suite but about specific tactical position that happen in a game.

I will explain my intuition by an extreme case.

Imagine that you have a patch that make the program 2 times faster but also cause it to lose on time in 1% of the cases.

It is clearly going to cause it to be weaker against very weak opponents but stronger against stronger players or against itself.

A change that cause a significant tactical weakness relative to all top programs is the same because it means that there are positions when other programs are stronger than it and even if the chances of a very weak program to get one of these positions is only 1% then it may increase the expected result of the weak program from 0% to at least 0.5%

Note that my intuition does not tell me that being weaker in tactics means being weaker against weak opponents and the main point is the factor that you are weaker.

If you are twice slower in seeing something because of some patch then it is clearly possible that another improvement more than compensate for it but if you are more than 20 times slower then the probability for other factors to compensate for it seems to me smaller
espacielly when I do not talk about composed position or something that seems to almost never happen in games.

[Don]

Although I cannot see this ever happening they could even in the future "close the sources" and keep the changes contributed and there is nothing you could do. They OWN the licence.

I think this is untrue. If you contribute to Stockfish you become a copyright holder. It is not necessary to explicitly claim copyright.

Being a copyright owner you can object to the closing of the source code (at least you may request that your contributions are removed first).

That is incorrect - you do not become a copyright holder

This is not about GPL. This is about Copyright laws which vary from country to country.
In most European countries a person automatically has a copyright for the work he has done. Of course the copyright laws only apply when work done is"non-trivial", so changing a single value or adding two lines of code usually doesn't count.

E.g. FSF explicitly requests everyone who has done significant contributions for their code, to surrender their rights (see: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maint ... al-Matters, section 6.2) to avoid copyright claims later.

I see the paragraph that says anyone doing non-trivial work becomes a copyright holder so I stand corrected on this. I was told otherwise when I was looking into using GPL for a project I was paid to do.

Here is the passage:

But if contributors are not all assigning their copyrights to a single copyright holder, it can easily happen that one file has several copyright holders. Each contributor of nontrivial text is a copyright holder.

[Sharaf_DG]

Indeed, the pace of Stockfish improvement is amazing, the development framework constructed by Gary is awesome.
Clearly no individual or two-person team can keep up with this in the long run, so this could mean the end of commercial chess engines as we currently know them. Maybe in 2 years time only Stockfish and derivates will continue to be developed.

Robert

Robert we can certainly keep with the 'cores'

[Uri Blass]

Although I cannot see this ever happening they could even in the future "close the sources" and keep the changes contributed and there is nothing you could do. They OWN the licence.

I think this is untrue. If you contribute to Stockfish you become a copyright holder. It is not necessary to explicitly claim copyright.

Being a copyright owner you can object to the closing of the source code (at least you may request that your contributions are removed first).

That is incorrect - you do not become a copyright holder

This is not about GPL. This is about Copyright laws which vary from country to country.
In most European countries a person automatically has a copyright for the work he has done. Of course the copyright laws only apply when work done is"non-trivial", so changing a single value or adding two lines of code usually doesn't count.

E.g. FSF explicitly requests everyone who has done significant contributions for their code, to surrender their rights (see: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maint ... al-Matters, section 6.2) to avoid copyright claims later.

I see the paragraph that says anyone doing non-trivial work becomes a copyright holder so I stand corrected on this. I was told otherwise when I was looking into using GPL for a project I was paid to do.

Here is the passage:

But if contributors are not all assigning their copyrights to a single copyright holder, it can easily happen that one file has several copyright holders. Each contributor of nontrivial text is a copyright holder.

I am not sure if I am copyright holder because it is not clear what means non trivial work(and I only changed few lines here and there when my most complex change is probably my time management change)

I also wonder what is the advantage that being a copyright holder can give people.

Can they win money at court against people who do not respect their copyright and sell stockfish derivatives?

[S.Taylor]

But there is another side effect of open development that could be more threatening for commercial engines, a threat that was not foreseen in advance and that even I didn't realize it would be a problem. This is the obsolescence of release process: just few days after Stockfish 4 is out, almost all power users have dismissed it in favor of last nightly build (I just come here now from Playchess where there is even not one SF 4 but are all nightly builds): this is something commercial engines have no defense against, simply they cannot do this. As long as the ELO gap is big it is ok, but when the open developed engine reaches the level of commercials, a new compile each day can really badly affect the commercial release because it greatly speeds up its obsolescent.

I have to say that this was not foreseen and I am sorry for this, it is not out target (daily binaries are even built outside of SF team) but it is something that, considered the open nature of the development, it is almost impossible to avoid.

Marco, there really is no reason to feel sorry, it's called progress. Commercial engines will have to adapt to the new situation or disappear.

You guys have done an awesome job - it's really outstanding to add 100+ Elo to a top engine in less than 6 months. Congratulations to all the contributors for this achievement!

Cheers,
Robert

Robert,
Can we see from your recent posts (or anyway), and mostly silence, that you are not at the momment expecting to come out with any major upgrades in the near future?