Fabien's open letter to the community

[Xann]

And so what will you do? (and I don't mean you specifically Chan), I mean you or anybody else? I for one will continue to use Fabian's Go programs if that's helpful?

Where will you "go"? (As Mr Berliner once told me)

Hi Christopher,

I remember your name, but not sure about the topic.
Was it Arena?

What Go programs?

You talked to Berliner?!!!

Fabien.

[Xann]

Wael - it was Stefan Meyer-Kahlen who had an exchange of emails with Fabien. You misread his post. Nobody can find any comment by Vas anywhere that he had contacted Fabien.
I know that you're angry that you feel let down by Vas, but facts are important.

I remember the contact with SMK, who I also met at WCCC 2005.

And you never know what this just reminds me of.
On Saturday I also read a post along the lines "But Fabien met Vasik at WCCC 2005 and did not say anything so he must be OK with Vasik".
This post was obviously not from Vasik, so there is much less of a chance that anyone remembers.
However it might be what Wael is referring to, who knows?

No Vasik at WCCC 2005 though.

Fabien.

[Graham Banks]

Wael - it was Stefan Meyer-Kahlen who had an exchange of emails with Fabien. You misread his post. Nobody can find any comment by Vas anywhere that he had contacted Fabien.
I know that you're angry that you feel let down by Vas, but facts are important.

I remember the contact with SMK, who I also met at WCCC 2005.

And you never know what this just reminds me of.
On Saturday I also read a post along the lines "But Fabien met Vasik at WCCC 2005 and did not say anything so he must be OK with Vasik".
This post was obviously not from Vasik, so there is much less of a chance that anyone remembers.
However it might be what Wael is referring to, who knows?

No Vasik at WCCC 2005 though.

Fabien.

You need to be very careful about what is true and what is not true.
Personally, I cannot recall Vas saying either of these things.

Cheers,
Graham.

[Xann]

Hi, xann. I haven't seen you since the IOS days and Turtle and company. Good to see you're alive and well.

Wow!!!

What was your nickname?
Did you write a program?

I spent a lot of time on Othello.
Because of this, my approach to chess search was much more mature than say evaluation.
Thinking about it, it also affected evaluation: continuous game phases for instance.

For readers, <iOs> stands for Internet Othello Server (in the nineties).
Turtle is one of the programs I wrote during that period.

Fabien.

[Xann]

Suppose you change the basic move structure in a program from e.g. mailbox to bitboard and you do this by starting from scratch.
I would consider this to be a new engine. Changing the basic move structure is a huge undertaking and requires understanding of all the important details of the engine and most likely a total rewrite from scratch.

Maybe we can ask other people whether they would consider it a new engine.
Apart from the different ordering of moves with equal score (due to mailbox vs. bitboard move generation order), the engine behaviour would be identical.
Same search, same eval.

By "huge undertaking", maybe you mean that one has to understand CC basics and modify a lot of code.
But the way I see it is different:
Which is the hugher undertaking:
a) convert Fruit to bitboards
b) write a world-class engine (as of 2005) from scratch

Fabien.

[Xann]

I took a brief at look at Fruit v2.1.2 and compared it to Strelka 2.0, there are many differences though.

* Strelka is all bitboard Fruit is not.
* Strelka has multiple specialized search routines for check and null windows, Fruit does not.
* Evaluation and move selection looks quite different.

Looks are not so important.

Several experts that possibly don't want to be mentioned plus myself concluded that Strelka contains a large amount of Fruit algorithms.
Ryan, however, did not see Fruit in Strelka.
Anthony concluded that it was perhaps a modified version of Fritz 5.
Anthony is most certainly an expert.

How are these differences possible?
It's because I, and I assume some others as well, look "through" the code all the way to what it computes (the mathematical function that the code implements).
And we compare what Strelka computes with what Fruit computes.
"What", not "how".
And we find a match.

Bob, does this makes sense to you?

Fabien.

[Xann]

they don't allow clone talk in the Rybka forum. All clone threads are moved to a hidden subforum that members with 500+ posts there have access to.

I am talking about the (apparently temporary) resurrection of a 2008 thread.

Fabien.

[Matthias Gemuh]

Suppose you change the basic move structure in a program from e.g. mailbox to bitboard and you do this by starting from scratch.
I would consider this to be a new engine. Changing the basic move structure is a huge undertaking and requires understanding of all the important details of the engine and most likely a total rewrite from scratch.

Maybe we can ask other people whether they would consider it a new engine.
Apart from the different ordering of moves with equal score (due to mailbox vs. bitboard move generation order), the engine behaviour would be identical.
Same search, same eval.

By "huge undertaking", maybe you mean that one has to understand CC basics and modify a lot of code.
But the way I see it is different:
Which is the hugher undertaking:
a) convert Fruit to bitboards
b) write a world-class engine (as of 2005) from scratch

Fabien.

I have always said that changing the infrastucture of move generation (e.g. from mailbox to bitboards) and then adapting (or "translating") the remaining source code is just another form of "copy and paste".
The result of the adaption is not a new engine.
As a chess programmer, I know what I'm talking about.

Matthias.

[Graham Banks]

they don't allow clone talk in the Rybka forum. All clone threads are moved to a hidden subforum that members with 500+ posts there have access to.

I am talking about the (apparently temporary) resurrection of a 2008 thread.

Fabien.

Check your messages. I've given you a link to where you can view more information that could be useful to you.

[Graham Banks]

they don't allow clone talk in the Rybka forum. All clone threads are moved to a hidden subforum that members with 500+ posts there have access to.

I am talking about the (apparently temporary) resurrection of a 2008 thread.

Fabien.

Somebody has posted a back up copy of that thread if you want to go take another look:
http://rybka.atspace.us/clon.htm
http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforu ... l?tid=6772