Any news of a Komodo update in sight?

[Werewolf]

Are you serious ?
Really who cares anymore whether Komodo or any other Engine gets updated anymore unless they incorporate MCTC algorithm into it, instead of the now obsolete Alpha-Beta Search.

This logic is pretty flawed. Alpha Zero won on much more powerful hardware. There won't be anything great on your GPU etc. that will compete with Komodo. (Well that's my prediction anyway - hopefully I am wrong)

[Dokterchen]

Are you serious ?
Really who cares anymore whether Komodo or any other Engine gets updated anymore unless they incorporate MCTC algorithm into it, instead of the now obsolete Alpha-Beta Search.

Is your real name Rolf Tueschen?

[F. Bluemers]

Are you serious ?
Really who cares anymore whether Komodo or any other Engine gets updated anymore unless they incorporate MCTC algorithm into it, instead of the now obsolete Alpha-Beta Search.

Is your real name Rolf Tueschen?

afaik he did not (re-)start another kasparov-deep thought discussion,so I doubt it.

[shrapnel]

Is your real name Rolf Tueschen?

Awesome name !
I wish...

[shrapnel]

Alpha Zero won on much more powerful hardware.

Ahh..Werewolf, we meet again.
So you've convinced yourself that AlphaZero won only because of superior hardware !
Awesome !
Did you even bother going through the Games ?
You're living proof that one can convince oneself of ANYTHING, provided one believes strongly enough, despite all evidence to the contrary !
You believe, what you want to believe.

[shrapnel]

OK. Relax guys. Keep your Blinkers on !
Enjoy yourselves with your already obsolete chess engines.
Far be it for me to spoil your simple fun !

[BrendanJNorman]

OK. Relax guys. Keep your Blinkers on !
Enjoy yourselves with your already obsolete chess engines.
Far be it for me to spoil your simple fun !

Simple fun? Aronian recently mentioned that he still uses a 3 year old engine, and many people on this forum (and in the general chess world) like to play against old DOS programs.

Chessmaster was the best selling chess software in history in the same era that Fritz, Junior, Shredder and co were leading the SSDF lists.

What is it in chess that interests you man?

The beauty of the game, or d&*k measuring?

[mjlef]

If people want learning in Komodo, let your voice be heard; Mark and Larry are open to feature requests, especially those requested by a lot of people.
'.

So Reinforcement Learning will be introduced by Komodo team (if they are capable of it) only on REQUEST.
Looks like the thrashing stockfish received still hasn't convinced them.
*** Unbelievable.

Of course we listen to requests. But I do not think the Romi learning is anything like the learning Google/DeepMind did. They used 5000 special TensorFlow Processing units (TPUs), each costing thousands of dollars. Right now, this is way beyond our resources. Romi learning is most likely simply saving important positions in a persistant hash. In future games, these are reloaded into the main hash table, so the new game, if ir encouters one of these positions, alread has deep search information ofr them. The thing is, this helps not at all if a different lien is played. My old program NOW had this feature, but I did it not so much to make it stronger, but instead to avoid losing lines during tournaments. You can think of it as a self-correcting book, which benefits if the same line it tried on Komodo.

Larry and I often discuss Monte Carlo Tree Search, and are interested in trying this. We have also discussed uses for neural networks. Small nns could be useful in present PCs, but the massive nn used in AlphaGo Zero is currently beyond what we, and most chess engine users can afford.

We listen, and try to add what we think people want. But we do not have endless resources. We can afford to buy roughly 1 new server each year. It is not a matter of being "convinced". We just cannot afford it currently. Hopefully, GPUs in graphics cards will get faster and perhaps nn hardware will get added to future PCs or at least be much less expensive.

[modolief]

Thanks Mark, that answers a lot of questions

[Werewolf]

Alpha Zero won on much more powerful hardware.

Ahh..Werewolf, we meet again.
So you've convinced yourself that AlphaZero won only because of superior hardware !
Awesome !
Did you even bother going through the Games ?
You're living proof that one can convince oneself of ANYTHING, provided one believes strongly enough, despite all evidence to the contrary !
You believe, what you want to believe.

I wonder if you've looked at the evidence.

Alpha Zero is impressive, did I say otherwise?
But Stockfish was CRIPPLED with no opening book, 1 GB of RAM (even my laptop has more!) and an awful time control not to mention they used old Stockfish 8!

Add up all these disadvantages AND factor in the superior hardware of AlphaZero and it didn't win by that much.

Give me the same amount of money they spent on their hardware and I bet I could equal it with SF (with some help from the SF team).