Tom Barrister wrote:Don wrote: [snip]
I'm not interested in rehashing who or what new program is or is not a clone of Rybka [snip]
Yeah, you are. You came back again after stating the same thing earlier.
I'm afraid that I don't see the point to your last post, unless calling me names and flaming me is the goal here. I suppose you've had a lot of practice at that, but I really don't care to read all 1065 of your posts to find out. You're certainly in good company here; a lot of others do the same thing. I try to stay out of that, but it's difficult sometimes.
I don't mean this as a personal insult to anyone and I'm sorry about the strong language. I used the term idiot unfairly and harshly, a more appropriate word is "fool" because a fool does not lack intelligence, he just tends to be easily swayed by emotional arguments and (in my opinion) generally is a participant in his own willingness to be fooled.
But the arguments that I keep seeing posted are just not reasonable or logical. I especially cringe at the references to Fruit and Rybka which is almost always presented to deflect attention away from the clones, not to present evidence that some other program is, or is not a clone. (But it works on an emotional level.)
Don't you see how foolish this is? Someone says that they think some program is a clone of Rybka, and then the Vas bashing begins. ????
It is clear that all programs are in some sense a product of all the programs that came before them. But I think Rybka pretty much blew away everyone else in this regard. You can try to go negative to refute this (since facts won't work for you in this regard), but the simple truth is that almost all of the last 200 ELO of progress came from Rybka. The new Rybka wannabees may have SOME original ideas in them, but they have clearly failed to put any distance between themselves and Rybka. Whether Rybka is a clone of Fruit hardly matters to me, she put hundreds of ELO between herself and the rest of the pack. You don't do this with clonesmanship.
There are people on this forum who squeal with delight if a clone gets close to Rybka on some rating list. They do not report this with any objectivity but treat it as if it's some kind of deliverance from evil. Such behavior makes it seem like there is an anti-Rybka movement composed of emotional people who have an axe to grind.
I also sense vigilantism because when the argument is presented that Rybka might be a Fruit clone it tends to be to criticize the morality of Vas and at the same time used as a justification for the clones. It is basically saying that it is only fair that Vas is "punished" and that he gets what he deserves, etc. It's like a pat on the back of the cloners for doing what they seem to think Vas did to them. Of course it's completely ignored that Vas advanced the state of the art by at least 200 ELO, but the cloners so far have not been able to increase it even by 1 ELO.
In a decade that saw massive improvement in chess engines as a whole, wouldn't you expect a program that's not been developed in over three years to lag behind those which have been actively worked on? It would be absurd to think otherwise.
There are many programs that have been in development for years and some of them are near the top. Rybka came and blew them all away. This has nothing to do with Fruit.
Of course you want to make another connection to Fruit by implying that Rybka only followed the path that Fruit would have taken (and thus Rybka is not a leader but just another follower.)
The "cause" is that Rybka blazed new trails. The "effect" is that everyone else had to catch up by copying Rybka. When you blaze a trail people follow your path and you are treating us like idiots by trying to imply that it was actually the other way around. This is why I keep saying this argument about fruit is so emotional and intellectually dishonest and appeals only to fools who do not see to want to think this through in any kind of objective way.
I stated nowhere (yet) that Mr. Rajlich stole code from Fruit. I did offer it as a hypothesis. There's a long line of others ahead of me who support that hypothesis, and contrary to your beliefs, not all of them are "fools" or "idiot(s)" (your words) for believing it.
This is yet another diversion. It's NOT important. I don't care if Vas lied or didn't. I don't care if ten years ago Vas started with Fruit to save having to write a move generator. This is just not important and in no ways helps to determine if some suspected clone is based on Rybka or not.
What is important is that Vas blazed new trials, and so far none of the many brand new programs have done anything to compare to this. No amount of sleight of hand, misdirection or emotionally appealing arguments will change this fact.
Hey, I know what we can do - let's talk about Fruit again since it doesn't have anything to do with anything.
As far as Rybka itself goes, it's arguably the strongest program available to the public, although its lead is tenuous, and the competition is closing in. Since Mr. Rajlich has stated that Rybka 5 won't be out until the fall of 2011, it would be logical to believe that at least one of the competition will pass Rybka in the interim. Some believe that it's happened already. Stockfish, Houdini, Ivanhoe, Firebird, and probably a few others could make a good case to stake a claim to the top spot.
What's the point of this?
By reverse engineering Rybka we have for the most part caught Rybka. We have taken her secrets and now we are bragging about it.
Whether this is right or wrong is another discussion, but it turns my stomach to carry on as if we have done something great and not give Rybka most of the credit for this.
I want everyone to know that I am not especially a Rybka lover. I can be pretty competitive and I am jealous of her accomplishments. If Rybka had never existed neither would any of the suddenly appearing new programs with authors nobody ever heard of and Stockfish would be 100 ELO weaker as would Komodo and many other programs.
But I believe in credit where credit is deserved, even if it has to be grudgingly admitted.
I also believe that if Fabien Letouzey started seriously working on chess engines again, that his engine would, in time, be a major player, possibly the best out there. in my opinion, he's that good.
It's not likely he would improved Fruit 300 ELO in a few months. What he did was impressive but we will never know.
If he is really that good he could take what he has and incorporate what is in the open source clones and then add 100 ELO to that. And THAT is my point, if you can take the best out there and add 300 ELO then you have my respect and that is what Vas did. I have not seen anyone else do anything like that since then, have you?
The more I see the Rybka community spouting about their almighty engine and Deity of a programmer, and the more I see almost every one of them flame anybody who dares attack either, the more disenchanted I get with Rybka as a whole. It's been my experience that when multitudes of people all proclaim something is so (in this case, that Rybka stole nothing/little from Fruit and that Mr. Rajlich is innocent of any chicanery) and flame anybody who disagrees, the opposite is generally true. I've tried to be objective about the whole clone issue, but I'm inclined to believe that the folks who say that Rybka was largely derived from Fruit are correct.
This is just not an important issue.
I agree with you about the hero worship given Vas and people do get carried away - but on the other hand it's incredibly difficult to buy into the propaganda that this was not an impressive accomplishment. You are trying to imply that what he did is not impressive at all by drawing attention to programs that only now are just catching up after several years (and it's almost certainly because they have picked apart what is in Rybka to do this.)
Then there's the matter that I haven't touched on (but many others have) that Rybka just happened along, out of thin air, and rose to the top in a very short time.....just about the same time Fruit's last release, and about the time it went open-source. It's almost as though xann (Mr. Letouzey) knew or at least believed that Mr. Rajlich ripped Fruit almost line-for-line, got fed up, and left in disgust. According to what I've read, Mr. Letouzey did make a comment, at about that time, inferring that several people were using Fruit's source (possibly even before it was open-source) for their engines. That may be relevant, or it may not, but one is certainly not an "idiot" or "fool" for wondering.
I can only speculate about what might have happened, I don't really know.
I think it's very possible that Vas initially started with Fruit but he did not end up with anything remotely like Fruit. I don't know if you are programmer but going to 64 bits is no trivial modification. It completely changes everything about a program. Vas added over 300 ELO and he didn't do it by making a few tweaks here and there - he changed virtually everything about the program including the very guts of it.
Rybka rose to the top in a very short time but you cannot claim that was because he copied someone. Every chess programmer knows that the last 100 ELO are by far the hardest. Those 300 ELO are not from Fruit, they are from Vas (and Larry.) And those 300 ELO represent 99 percent of the program and the work that went into it.
This is not to mention the fact that if he did start with Fruit, it's a completely new program now as you cannot cut and paste 32 bit source code to form a 64 bit program. This is just part of the reason that I find this argument so hollow and irrelevant.
I know this was not the main thrust of your argument and I appreciate that. But most of the posts on this subject of Rybka clones immediately ends up with an assertion that Rybka is a clone of Fruit and by implication that Vas didn't do anything original.
