WCCC 2011 - Junior is the 2011 World Champion

[marcelk]

The assumption there is that forcing everyone to write their own move generator, SEE, SMP before they can add value is a good thing. You can also see it as a barrier that keeps new entrants out.

Yes and that may be a good thing. If you can't code a legal move generator then why should you be allowed in?

Because it is not a move generator programming contest.

This tournaments is clearly dying in its current form. Without change of direction this tournament is over in a few years.
That would not be because computer chess innovation has stopped as the innovation is very well alive.

With the heavily improved derivatives the question is not that of possessing skill but choosing where to apply that skill to:
reinventing wheels or adding value.
We have seen that the latter is possible without necessarily doing the first. Great, then welcome those entrants please.

I agree with others that such change doesn't directly address some other core issues:
- unwillingness to attribute sources to begin with
- difficulty in enforcement (avoiding the 5-year delay in the Rybka fiasco)
- decline in interest to invest in tickets, hotel and time
- coverage. this is not a technical problem (games were broadcast live and reports followed quickly after each round), but a channeling problem (eg: even the organization's own website still showed the entry form instead of covering the events).
- missing of many of the strongest programs

The question becomes what should be in the jump start code. Such a rule is a bit of a problem due to erosion of the idea over time. Eventually, the jump start code would become something on the order of Rybka and that is going too far for now.

Why not shake up the feathers here. "All open source" could be a fantastic starting point.
Get rid of rear mirrors and embrace the Internet age.

Re Don's question who of the participants suggested the discussion of an 'added value' rule set,
in public I can only remark that it was suggested by some of the top entrants and not by me.

[Don]

The assumption there is that forcing everyone to write their own move generator, SEE, SMP before they can add value is a good thing. You can also see it as a barrier that keeps new entrants out.

Yes and that may be a good thing. If you can't code a legal move generator then why should you be allowed in?

Because it is not a move generator programming contest.

This tournaments is clearly dying in its current form. Without change of direction this tournament is over in a few years.
That would not be because computer chess innovation has stopped as the innovation is very well alive.

With the heavily improved derivatives the question is not that of possessing skill but choosing where to apply that skill to:
reinventing wheels or adding value.
We have seen that the latter is possible without necessarily doing the first. Great, then welcome those entrants please.

I agree with others that such change doesn't directly address some other core issues:
- unwillingness to attribute sources to begin with
- difficulty in enforcement (avoiding the 5-year delay in the Rybka fiasco)
- decline in interest to invest in tickets, hotel and time
- coverage. this is not a technical problem (games were broadcast live and reports followed quickly after each round), but a channeling problem (eg: even the organization's own website still showed the entry form instead of covering the events).
- missing of many of the strongest programs

The question becomes what should be in the jump start code. Such a rule is a bit of a problem due to erosion of the idea over time. Eventually, the jump start code would become something on the order of Rybka and that is going too far for now.

Why not shake up the feathers here. "All open source" could be a fantastic starting point.
Get rid of rear mirrors and embrace the Internet age.

Re Don's question who of the participants suggested the discussion of an 'added value' rule set,
in public I can only remark that it was suggested by some of the top entrants and not by me.

Ok, so the meeting was secret. I was just asking. But if it was secret then it's not fair to just spit out the parts that you want heard. So some of it was secret and some wasn't, and you will decide?

The tournament is dying because more and more people stay home and use the computer as their social network just as we seem to be doing here. The economy is in a bad state world-wide and less people are willing to shell out the big bucks for this and these tournaments are very high in their overhead. It makes the tournament really nice, but it makes them pricey.

These tournaments are NOT dying because we are getting so dumb that nobody knows how to write a real chess programs. More people write original chess programs than ever before in history. If you want a "clone wars" tournament then you have a completely different type of tournament, but it's not an authors tournament. Since I am an author, it's not a tournament that I would attend.

[marcelk]

Re Don's question who of the participants suggested the discussion of an 'added value' rule set,
in public I can only remark that it was suggested by some of the top entrants and not by me.

Ok, so the meeting was secret. I was just asking. But if it was secret then it's not fair to just spit out the parts that you want heard. So some of it was secret and some wasn't, and you will decide?

The meeting was not secret. The reason I don't feel it correct to mention names without consent is because if those programmers want to have their head of chopped off in this forum like me they are free to post here by themselves, and second because discussing persons instead of ideas is not what I'm interested in.

[Don]

Re Don's question who of the participants suggested the discussion of an 'added value' rule set,
in public I can only remark that it was suggested by some of the top entrants and not by me.

Ok, so the meeting was secret. I was just asking. But if it was secret then it's not fair to just spit out the parts that you want heard. So some of it was secret and some wasn't, and you will decide?

The meeting was not secret. The reason I don't feel it correct to mention names without consent is because if those programmers want to have their head of chopped off in this forum like me they are free to post here by themselves, and second because discussing persons instead of ideas is not what I'm interested in.

I'm not looking to hang anyone, I want to have a better sense of what happened and what was said and who said it, i.e. the programmers who have already hung up their hats or the ones who currently have active strong programs?

The problem is that if you have someone obviously in favor of an idea reporting on the same idea you are not likely to get an objective report.

[Don]

The Ippo people, or at least Milos seems to be jealous and contemptuous of Junior's title and thinks that Junior should not have been shown any honor for the win. They don't respect anyone but themselves and they have the over-inflated EGO's.
If you look at the "real" authors you will see there is no such infighting among them.

I get your 'spin' Don...but it won't work.

The 'Ippo people' are 'real' authors, every bit as much as you...
very methodical and documented development, innovations galore, a complete table-base solution, java GUIs, etc.
(the list goes on and on, i won't waste space here)

and they're publishing a program that's stronger than Komodo (source code included!) for free...
while remaining anonymous... i.e. taking no individual credit for anything.

taking note of your endless anti-ippolit propaganda,
the question begs to be asked:
who's jealous, contemptuous (and/or over-inflated ego) here...you or them?

I have not even looked at Ivanhoe, only Robbolito but I decided to take a look at Ivanhoe and just downloaded the 99946f version and saw the interesting ComradsGui which is definitely something I am interested in as there are not many Linux choices for GUI's.

I tried to run it but I get a java error about Unsupported major.minor version 51.0

I tried a more updated Ubuntu distribution and get the same exact error. Does anyone here know how to work around this? In a major linux distribution this should just work.

As far as your comment about being Jealous because Ivanhoe is so much stronger than Komodo I have to disagree with you on both points. Komodo in my testing is stronger than Ivanhoe, even at really fast games where the Ippo's are especially strong. This is even with the Robbo bases on. I think your comment is based on old data.

Ivanhoe has many features Komodo does not yet have such as database and MP and so we cannot compete on multi-core hardware (although that's not actually clear to me, since Komodo is stronger you need at least 2 cores to compete with Komodo.) I assume Ivanhoe will be stronger on 4 cores because on one core our development versions of Komodo only appears to be 20 or 30 ELO stronger than Ivanhoe. The fairest match would be Ivanhoe on 2 cores vs Komodo on 1 core.

According to Ed Shroeder, I would be a hypocrite if I implemented MP on Komodo because it's not my original idea, it would be plagiarism. Others have done it before me and it would only be valid if I gave shared authorship to whoever did the first MP stuff. But I'm going to do it anyway.

By the way, even though you think Komodo is a clone of Ivanhoe I am seeing that it is almost a full ply faster than Komodo and does about 50% more nodes per second! And yet is still manages to be stronger than Ivanhoe. Apparently I copied all the ideas and did such a bad job the program acts completely different and is stronger.

Code: Select all

Rank Name           Elo      +      -    games   score   oppo.   draws 
   1 kse-4319.15  3027.2   46.5   46.5     193   54.7%  3000.0   44.0% 
   2 ih946f       3000.0   46.5   46.5     193   45.3%  3027.2   44.0% 


      TIME       RATIO    log(r)     NODES    log(r)  ave DEPTH    GAMES   PLAYER
 ---------  ----------  --------  --------  --------  ---------  -------   -----------
    1.8512       1.000     0.000     2.643     0.000    16.5064      193   ih946f
    1.8742       1.012     0.012     1.758    -0.408    15.6743      193   kse-4319.15

[Rebel]

According to Ed Shroeder, I would be a hypocrite if I implemented MP on Komodo because it's not my original idea, it would be plagiarism.

Correction, according to the ICGA.

[Don]

According to Ed Shroeder, I would be a hypocrite if I implemented MP on Komodo because it's not my original idea, it would be plagiarism.

Correction, according to the ICGA.

But it's your view that anyone that disagree's with your point of view is a hypocrite. Since I will use MP, then according to you I have no right to complain if someone makes an exact clone of Komodo. The words hypocrite is the one YOU used, not the ICGA.

So essentially, NOBODY can complain about any sort of code copying if they want to write a chess program, because it's of course impossible to write a chess program without ideas that someone else might have used.

That is your twisted reasoning, not the ICGA's.

[Terry McCracken]

According to Ed Shroeder, I would be a hypocrite if I implemented MP on Komodo because it's not my original idea, it would be plagiarism.

Correction, according to the ICGA.

But it's your view that anyone that disagree's with your point of view is a hypocrite. Since I will use MP, then according to you I have no right to complain if someone makes an exact clone of Komodo. The words hypocrite is the one YOU used, not the ICGA.

So essentially, NOBODY can complain about any sort of code copying if they want to write a chess program, because it's of course impossible to write a chess program without ideas that someone else might have used.

That is your twisted reasoning, not the ICGA's.

You're wasting your time Don. Sad but true.

[hgm]

Perhaps it would be good to shorten this discussion by acknowledging that we all agree that

1) Anyone claiming that implementing SMP requires acknowledgement of the first person to discover that using two CPUs on the same task can be faster than using one deserves no more attention than is needed to stamp the word "Idiot" on his forehead.

2) The ICGA does not consider using the standard SMP algorithms code copying in the sense of rule #2.

[Don]

Perhaps it would be good to shorten this discussion by acknowledging that we all agree that

1) Anyone claiming that implementing SMP requires acknowledgement of the first person to discover that using two CPUs on the same task can be faster than using one deserves no more attention than is needed to stamp the word "Idiot" on his forehead.

Exactly! Thank you.

Ed is claiming that using ideas that might be in other programs makes you a hypocrite and plagiarist unless you conform to HIS viewpoint - that eveyone does this, therefore nobody has the write to complain about copying or code theft. I think that is a very unreasonable point of view and I'm glad you see the silliness of this although I would think almost anyone would.

2) The ICGA does not consider using the standard SMP algorithms code copying in the sense of rule #2.

Of course not. The ICGA is a reasonable organization but it's painted as being extremely literal about code copying, that they are going to go after you if they think you might have copied one line of code.

But the truth of the matter is that there was evidence of massive code copying and rewriting.