Marco steps down as Stockfish maintainer

[bnculp]

Marco Costalba has stepped down as maintainer of Stockfish :

https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?from ... sYuyij6uqQ


"I have decided to step down as Stockfish maintainer

I have less and less time and I am tired on engaging in long and annoying discussions every time a patch passes LTC (or even when it doesn't).

Sometime I hope that a patch does not pass LTC for the trouble that it will get, of course this cannot be the right mind approach of a maintainer, so I am no more suitable for this job.

To maintain a project like SF requires a lot of work, especially if you want to remain strict on the quality of the stuff you apply, it requires much less work if you apply anything that passes, but this is not my aim and I will never accept it.

Lately this work became a real pain.

I ask you, as a community, to fork my repo and continue this effort on that. I will keep my repo active as private development, where I will add what I like according to my own judgement. Of course I will give up submitting tests on fishtest because, as the rule says, only official dev branch can be tested in fishtest. Possibly I will apply some good (according to my only judgment) patch from master repo, giving credit to the author, until the two repos will diverge so much that back porting without testing becomes too risky and eventually my repo will die of natural death.

Probably a new development model will raise, and I wish the new one to be better than the old one, although I strongly doubt that applying anything is a good policy in the long term. But this is no more a decision belonging to me, nor a decision I'd want to be involved.

Now Stockfish is the strongest engine in the world. This is much more than what I had dream of when I forked Glaurung in 2008, and I really cannot ask more from this journey in chess engine world.

Have fun
Marco
"

Some background may be found here with the details of his latest dispute with other Stockfish developers :

https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish/pull/243

[arjuntemurnikar]

This is just sad...

Now the Stockfish project is in disarray. There will be dozens of different forks by dozens of random people all claiming to be the "official heir" to stockfish.

It is not like in 2008 when glaurung --> stockfish was more of a private affair and probably 3-4 people actually paid attention to both projects. This time in 2014, stockfish is the top engine and the whole world has eyes on it.

I predict the next few months to have no progress for SF, with competing ideas and models all fighting to replace stockfish as the official fork.

Since fishtest can only run official forks, I don't know what will happen since now there is no official fork.

Probably lots of chaos.

[gladius]

This is just sad...

Now the Stockfish project is in disarray. There will be dozens of different forks by dozens of random people all claiming to be the "official heir" to stockfish.

It is not like in 2008 when glaurung --> stockfish was more of a private affair and probably 3-4 people actually paid attention to both projects. This time in 2014, stockfish is the top engine and the whole world has eyes on it.

I predict the next few months to have no progress for SF, with competing ideas and models all fighting to replace stockfish as the official fork.

Since fishtest can only run official forks, I don't know what will happen since now there is no official fork.

Probably lots of chaos.

Hi Arjun,

I'm still hopeful for the future of SF. Obviously, Marco leaving as the maintainer is a huge loss. He put a huge amount of work into improving SF and making it as simple and easy to understand as possible.

I think the community can step up though, and figure things out in short order though . I've created https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish and proposed some new ideas for contributing patches to SF on the fishcooking forum.

Gary

[Uri Blass]

I am not sure that it is bad news and we can hope that stockfish can find a better leader.

I do not like many of marco's actions:

1)Marco apply some patches without testing and later revert because there is probably a regression.

I think that the right order is first to test and only later put a new developement version in the stockfish webpage.

2)Marco does not have patience and there was more than one time when he asked to stop SPRT test because his opinion was that it takes too many games.

Edit:It is possible that some tests need significantly longer time control than 1 minutes per game(at least 5 minutes per game) but I do not expect marco to support them even at low priority because he probably does not have patience to wait more time for the tests to finish.

3)Marco's treatement for adding code and removing code is not symmetric and basically he is simply against changes.

I prefer model that use symmetric treatement for adding codes and removing code.

In other words if you think that it is a bad deal to lose 1 elo for removing few lines of code so you use SPRT(-3,1) twice and not SPRT(-4,0) twice
to reject most of the 1 elo losses then
then you should think that it is also a good deal to earn 1 elo for adding few lines of code and not use SPRT(1,6) to reject most of the 1 elo improvements.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

We will not let Marco step down.
There is not SF without Marco.

A project needs a leader. And Marco is the leader of SF. Marco should understand that he is the most important person in SF.

Obviously, there is some internal struggle going on in Marco between the full author and the maintainer. But SF already does not need a full author, it needs a leader.

One thing people submitting patches want to be sure of is that, when their patch passes all necessary tests, it will be applied without further considerations. There are always considerations about simplicity of the code and maintainability. However, you never know what could work in the future and what not. Code could later be changed, patches simplified, etc. The important thing is to accept patches as they are, without caring what will happen in the future, if they pass all tests. The most reliable test is increased strength and added elo. That is what fishtest is for - to judge if a patch is good or not to improve SF.

I think if all patches that pass the tests are applied, this will solve both Marco's and other people's problems.

Marco, it is so hard for a patch to pass. So it is not necessary to impose any further conditions. You have done sooo much for SF, you actually are 80% its author (on a par with Tord). Just let other people be happy with their 20% contribution. You have pushed so many successful patches on fishtest, great ideas. There are just times when other people have more time, more energy to work or simply more inspiration. That is only quite natural.

So I would say Please stay, Marco, SF will be dead without a leader. Only accept that you are not a full author, but just a leader, the most important of the authors. And do apply patches when they pass the tests.

I am sure you will think it over. You have also an obligation to the community.

[Henk]

No one wants to work for free all the time unless perhaps you have more than enough money and time and you like this work very much.

[arjuntemurnikar]

This is just sad...

Now the Stockfish project is in disarray. There will be dozens of different forks by dozens of random people all claiming to be the "official heir" to stockfish.

It is not like in 2008 when glaurung --> stockfish was more of a private affair and probably 3-4 people actually paid attention to both projects. This time in 2014, stockfish is the top engine and the whole world has eyes on it.

I predict the next few months to have no progress for SF, with competing ideas and models all fighting to replace stockfish as the official fork.

Since fishtest can only run official forks, I don't know what will happen since now there is no official fork.

Probably lots of chaos.

Hi Arjun,

I'm still hopeful for the future of SF. Obviously, Marco leaving as the maintainer is a huge loss. He put a huge amount of work into improving SF and making it as simple and easy to understand as possible.

I think the community can step up though, and figure things out in short order though . I've created https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish and proposed some new ideas for contributing patches to SF on the fishcooking forum.

Gary

Hi Gary,

I just saw your post.

Having a repo on github as part of an organization is a very good idea indeed. I didn't even think of it! This probably solves all the problems of mess of forks.

I really hope the community backs this, and we can all quickly settle down and continue progressing.

[arjuntemurnikar]

I was wondering if there was going to be a name change now (like glaurung -> stockfish), but I guess this would be a bad idea because Stockfish is already quite well known and has been growing a lot this year as a brand, so I would keep the name.

[syzygy]

Some background may be found here with the details of his latest dispute with other Stockfish developers :

https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish/pull/243

Interesting.

I personally understand Marco's unwillingness to commit that patch. For starters it removes future flexibility which just doesn't seem worth it. It's a hacky hack with unclear ramifications and it was being pushed in ugly ways.

I think Marco should have made very clear that he has veto powers on fundamental design decisions and that anyone not happy with a decision can start his own fork.

In a way that's what he has done now. If the official SF repo simply tracks his tree, then all is well

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

I was wondering if there was going to be a name change now (like glaurung -> stockfish), but I guess this would be a bad idea because Stockfish is already quite well known and has been growing a lot this year as a brand, so I would keep the name.

With all due respect,Stockfish is an extremely stupid name for a monster computer chess entity and I said that many many moons ago....

I hope a new powerful fork will appear soon with a proper name....
Dr.D