Vasik's Contribution

[gaard]

Excluding his chess playing programs, I am not sure how I would judge his contributions here in terms of the value of his posts. His more interesting ideas consisted of refining positional evaluations such that it would be more beneficial to spend a disproportionate amount of work evaluating positions, than it would be actually letting the search do the work. I, and I believe many others, were under the impression that this was the way to go and that it was working for him.

When Rybka 1.0 was released, you were then led to believe that this approach paid off for him, given its strength accompanied with low node and depth counts. However, when the Rybka 1 and Rybka 3 "sources" (using that term loosely) were made public, it was remarked by several successful chess programmers (including Anthony Cozzie and Joona Kiiski), that the evaluation was a little better than average but the real gem of a feat was its search, for its level of optimization and robustness. On top of that, it was evident that the search overhead was being obfuscated by outputting an artificially lower node and depth count.

My impression is that Vasik's "contributions" to this forum and computer chess in general, if we can call them that, are at best dubious and worst, underhanded. There is nothing wrong with withholding "trade secrets", but there is something wrong if your intent is to misinform people for the sake of person gain, especially if the people you are misinforming helped you achieve your ends asking nothing in return.

IMHO.

[Milos]

Excluding his chess playing programs, I am not sure how I would judge his contributions here in terms of the value of his posts. His more interesting ideas consisted of refining positional evaluations such that it would be more beneficial to spend a disproportionate amount of work evaluating positions, than it would be actually letting the search do the work. I, and I believe many others, were under the impression that this was the way to go and that it was working for him.

When Rybka 1.0 was released, you were then led to believe that this approach paid off for him, given its strength accompanied with low node and depth counts. However, when the Rybka 1 and Rybka 3 "sources" (using that term loosely) were made public, it was remarked by several successful chess programmers (including Anthony Cozzie and Joona Kiiski), that the evaluation was a little better than average but the real gem of a feat was its search, for its level of optimization and robustness. On top of that, it was evident that the search overhead was being obfuscated by outputting an artificially lower node and depth count.

My impression is that Vasik's "contributions" to this forum and computer chess in general, if we can call them that, are at best dubious and worst, underhanded. There is nothing wrong with withholding "trade secrets", but there is something wrong if your intent is to misinform people for the sake of person gain.

IMHO.

Great post, nothing really to add.

[kgburcham]

there is something wrong if your intent is to misinform people for the sake of person gain,
IMHO.

What does this statement mean?

kgburcham

[gaard]

Let's say you and I are working together to find a solution to a problem, or at least I think we are working together. If you propose that the solution is X to distract me from investigating Y, when in reality your best results come from Y, so that you can maintain a bigger lead over me for the purpose of profiting from solution Y (that I helped you find), then I would feel slighted.

[Matthias Gemuh]

there is something wrong if your intent is to misinform people for the sake of person gain,
IMHO.

What does this statement mean?

kgburcham

When you create the impression in public that the eval is the key issue, but secretly invest in search instead, even reducing displayed search depth to keep the public focussed on eval.

[mhalstern]

I love to see Vas's old posts. What is use username here?

[gaard]

The forum archives can be downloaded from Dann Corbit's ftp server, IIRC. He used his full name so it's not too hard to find them in the mountain of archives. I'd start with the 2004 and 2005 archives, again IIRC. It's been a while and I am not so good with dates.

[M ANSARI]

Vas was actually pretty active on this forum for quite some time, but he pretty much got hounded out. Actually I was always surprised how he managed to keep a level head and never got angry or rude to people who he disagreed with, even when at times some post were quite personal and obnoxious. It would be a historical error to claim that he just took and left when he got what he wanted. For those that were not here, this forum was pretty much only about Rybka when Rybka 1.0beta came out and that (rightfully or wrongfully) angered many people who claimed that he was taking over the forum and that was a violation of the charter, and that he should open his own forum instead ... something he did. I find it incredible that now that he is being accused of leaving after he got what he wanted ... while I can understand that some posting today were not there during that period, there are a lot of others that seem to have very short memories.

[Dave Mitchell]

Who says I have a short memory? << ROFL >>

[De Vos W]

I love to see Vas's old posts. What is use username here?

You love to see Vas's old posts? Here is one of them:

"Vasik Rajlich wrote:
Yes, the publication of Fruit 2.1 was huge. Look at how many engines took a massive jump in its wake: Rybka, Hiarcs, Fritz, Zappa, Spike, List, and so on. I went through the Fruit 2.1 source code forwards and backwards and took many things."

It is a bit of a pity that Rybka won't make the same contribution to the computer chess community, but at the moment I must also think about protecting my secrets. It's the eternal struggle for a computer chess programmer. "