Fabien's open letter to the community

[Christopher Conkie]

Another post that doesn't help Fabien a ...,but after 63 pages of ... why not me too

Exactly......if you cant beat the crap.....join in but tread carefully.

My thoughts entirely.

How are you btw Fonzy?

I'm fine but unfortunatly I picked up Dirt again,just could not resist...

Nothing wrong with getting ones hands dirty once in a while......

[bob]

Just for the record, "free CPU cycles" are not uncommon. I certainly got my fair share from Cray Research over the years, and I never paid a penny. They appreciated the publicity we generated.

I can remember running tests on 4 different crays at one point, trying to help the parallel library guys track down a bug that was only exposed by Cray Blitz. So getting time on a big machine is not exactly big news. Chess 4.x always ran on a 10 million buck Cyber 176 at CDC.

Not everything is associated with the NSA, DOD, CIA, and the rest of the alphabet-soup agencies in the US (and foreign) governments...

The level of support they provide is probably proportional to what they think they will get out of it. I can recall a phone call one day from Pat (can't recall her last name without having my office files handy) who was the Vice President of Software Development at Cray. She called the office, which created a stir. Her question was simply "Bob, I know you and our guys are working like mad to track down this parallel processing problem between your program and our libraries, but I have another issue that needs attention and every damned system guy I ask to look at it replies "I am working with Bob to track down this bug..." Do you think I can have just one of my guys back to help with this other problem?" She was a friendly sort and chuckled at the end. But it shows how much they supported us at the time...

Those were good days, with no dark mysteries or motives lurking in the background at all.. Just someone enjoying chess and trying to use the most powerful machine on the planet to play the game as well as possible... And a group of software guys that got caught up in the moment and wanted to make sure we continued to whip CDC's program, Chess 4.x...

[K I Hyams]

A expert has spoken, but lets be honest here, you still will not accept it. It does not change your mind one way or the other. So what is the point of your question? In the above statement even if Vas were convicted, I don't think you would accept it, only if he were found not guilty would you agree.

Not true. The whole reason I'd like to see it decided through the FSF is to get finality.
Unlike Bob, I would accept whatever decision they made and then move on.

So you would accept it, but would you agree with it? Thats what I wonder, not that you have to mind you. The same could be said for myself, I could accept it, but that does not mean that I agree with it. To bad as I don't think it will ever be decided or taken up by the FSF.

To me, an FSF decision would be good enough to give finality, which I was really hoping was what we all wanted.

You use the word “we”. It is not clear whom you include in that group. None of us are sure what the authors of Shredder, Fritz Hiarcs and Fruit would like. I suspect that 3 of them are acutely aware of the possibility that money that might otherwise gone to their families was diverted into the pocket of Vas Rajlich. The author of Fruit might have additional problems with what happened.

It is pretty obvious that you confuse justice with legality. Although, on the occasions on which they bring about the same outcome they may appear to be the same thing, they are not; one is what you seek and the other is what you get. Given the difference between the two, it is unwise to assume that somebody who seeks “finality” will get it from a legal system.

[Laskos]

Me too . In the trial version of Systat, I can change the linkage
methods also. I hope to have some time this weekend to do some
reading, and then experiment with these.

I found in SPSS a more reliable hierarchical cluster analysis algorithm. Average Linkage between Groups, before the first merge,
let N_i=1 for i = 1 to N (engines).
Update s_tr (S = similarity matrix) by
s_tr = s_pr+s_qr
Update N_t by
N_t = N_p+N_q
and then choose the most similar pair based on the value
s_ij / (N_i * N_j)
Measure is Pearson correlation (bivariate correlations algorithm)
r_ij = C_ij / sqrt(C_ii * C_jj).



The distances on the horizontal axis to the common ancestor is the degree of relatedness. This algorithm takes care of all the space, from leaves to upper branches. Upper branches were more fragile in the Complete Linkage between Groups with Euclidian measure.

Apparently Fruitish 2.1 branch is denoted by Fruit 2.1, apparenly Rybkish 3 branch is denoted by Rybka 3. A and B are general groups, A might have some fruitish ideas, B does not. If that assumption is correct, then Fruit 2.1 had a tremendous influence upon the recent (strong) engines.


Kai

[Adam Hair]

Me too . In the trial version of Systat, I can change the linkage
methods also. I hope to have some time this weekend to do some
reading, and then experiment with these.

I found in SPSS a more reliable hierarchical cluster analysis algorithm. Average Linkage between Groups, before the first merge,
let N_i=1 for i = 1 to N (engines).
Update s_tr (S = similarity matrix) by
s_tr = s_pr+s_qr
Update N_t by
N_t = N_p+N_q
and then choose the most similar pair based on the value
s_ij / (N_i * N_j)
Measure is Pearson correlation (bivariate correlations algorithm)
r_ij = C_ij / sqrt(C_ii * C_jj).



The distances on the horizontal axis to the common ancestor is the degree of relatedness. This algorithm takes care of all the space, from leaves to upper branches. Upper branches were more fragile in the Complete Linkage between Groups with Euclidian measure.

Apparently Fruitish 2.1 branch is denoted by Fruit 2.1, apparenly Rybkish 3 branch is denoted by Rybka 3. A and B are general groups, A might have some fruitish ideas, B does not. If that assumption is correct, then Fruit 2.1 had a tremendous influence upon the recent (strong) engines.


Kai

I don't think there is any doubt Fruit has been a large influence by
anybody.

Average linkage between groups is more robust than complete linkage.

I have made two graphs, using Systat and your data, as well as Average
and Pearson. I changed the diagonal from 100% to 75%. That was the
cause of the difference in scale between your graphs and mine.



As you can see, the graph is basically identical to yours. I just doing
this so that we both know that Systat and SPSS will produce the same
results.

For the second graph, I removed Houdini, Strelka, Ivanhoe, Rybka 4,
and Naum 4.2.



I did this to point out, as you also did, that some care has to be given
to which engines are included. The clusters can change with the inclusion
and exclusion of engines. My belief is, in order to avoid bias as much as
possible, several versions from each engine family should be included.
And as many engine families as possible should be included. Then I
think the clustering analysis can give us a true picture.

[tmokonen]

Am I to believe that a professional developer loses the sources of all the previous versions? No version control to keep old versions? No backups, nothing?

I don't really care about the Clone Wars, but as a developer it's amusing to see claims like these, which are either lies or just pure stupidity.

I can't imagine that Vas would be so stupid as to only have one copy of his code, so it would seem to me that Vas is conveniently lying about losing his code. Even an author of a crappy 1500 rated engine like me has multiple backups of his source on different devices.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Am I to believe that a professional developer loses the sources of all the previous versions? No version control to keep old versions? No backups, nothing?

I don't really care about the Clone Wars, but as a developer it's amusing to see claims like these, which are either lies or just pure stupidity.

I can't imagine that Vas would be so stupid as to only have one copy of his code, so it would seem to me that Vas is conveniently lying about losing his code. Even an author of a crappy 1500 rated engine like me has multiple backups of his source on different devices.

Do I have to say big YES here

[F. Bluemers]

Am I to believe that a professional developer loses the sources of all the previous versions? No version control to keep old versions? No backups, nothing?

I don't really care about the Clone Wars, but as a developer it's amusing to see claims like these, which are either lies or just pure stupidity.

I can't imagine that Vas would be so stupid as to only have one copy of his code, so it would seem to me that Vas is conveniently lying about losing his code. Even an author of a crappy 1500 rated engine like me has multiple backups of his source on different devices.

Do I have to say big YES here

Maybe not.
I never made backups until i experienced a hd failure myself.
Best
Fonzy

[alpha123]

Am I to believe that a professional developer loses the sources of all the previous versions? No version control to keep old versions? No backups, nothing?

I don't really care about the Clone Wars, but as a developer it's amusing to see claims like these, which are either lies or just pure stupidity.

I can't imagine that Vas would be so stupid as to only have one copy of his code, so it would seem to me that Vas is conveniently lying about losing his code. Even an author of a crappy 1500 rated engine like me has multiple backups of his source on different devices.

I'm quite surprised he doesn't use some form of version control. Even I do for some things, and I'm 14....

Peter

[michiguel]

Am I to believe that a professional developer loses the sources of all the previous versions? No version control to keep old versions? No backups, nothing?

I don't really care about the Clone Wars, but as a developer it's amusing to see claims like these, which are either lies or just pure stupidity.

I can't imagine that Vas would be so stupid as to only have one copy of his code, so it would seem to me that Vas is conveniently lying about losing his code. Even an author of a crappy 1500 rated engine like me has multiple backups of his source on different devices.

The claim I saw once (indirectly from another person, not from the horse's mouth) was that he lost version 3.00.

Accidents happened and it is possible to lose one "specific" version. Particularly if only one guy works on the code.

Miguel