Making an engine available for download

[Alexander Lim]

Hi folks,

I wanted to make my Chess Fighter engine available for download but wasn't sure of the best way to do this. It will consist of a 1MB .exe together with a 40MB .dat file for the neural net weights. It's not my intention to release any source code.

Looking around the 'new engine releases' thread I see most people are using GitHub. I've just joined GitHub but couldn't work out what to do (and for some reason my account's now flagged)

What about google drive? Or making my own website?

Chess Fighter 2 is currently being trained up and I would like the ability to release stronger and stronger weight files every so often so people can see the progress.

(I just noticed at the bottom you can add files as attachments to TalkChess, would that be an appropriate method?)

Alex

[supersharp77]

Hi folks,

I wanted to make my Chess Fighter engine available for download but wasn't sure of the best way to do this. It will consist of a 1MB .exe together with a 40MB .dat file for the neural net weights. It's not my intention to release any source code.

Looking around the 'new engine releases' thread I see most people are using GitHub. I've just joined GitHub but couldn't work out what to do (and for some reason my account's now flagged)

What about google drive? Or making my own website?

Chess Fighter 2 is currently being trained up and I would like the ability to release stronger and stronger weight files every so often so people can see the progress.

(I just noticed at the bottom you can add files as attachments to TalkChess, would that be an appropriate method?)

Alex

Some are using google drives....some use megauploads....some are using dropbox...some are using solidfiles
tiny uploads http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 5720314971 some attach the zip file also..
many methods....

[Alexander Lim]

I've worked out how to use google drive so will be posting a download link in due course.

One problem remains: Am I allowed to distribute an NVIDIA file: cudnn64_7.dll? Or do I need permission?

I had assumed that anyone using Chess Fighter will almost certainly have LC0 setup and would be able to use the cudnn64_7.dll that comes with the Leela download.

I did a quick test and found that Chess Fighter doesn't work with the cudnn64_7 (version 10.0.145) that comes with LC0 as Chess Fighter uses an earlier version (9.2.148).

[Alexander Lim]

In the LC0 folder there's a file CUDNN.txt that contains the "NVIDIA SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT". If I put this agreement in with the Chess Fighter download is that sufficient?

[crem]

In the LC0 folder there's a file CUDNN.txt that contains the "NVIDIA SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT". If I put this agreement in with the Chess Fighter download is that sufficient?

Yes, it should be enough.
Lc0 had also the problem from the opposite side, GPL by default doesn't allow bundling closed sourced libraries, but if your engine is not GPL, it's not an issue.

[MikeB]

In the LC0 folder there's a file CUDNN.txt that contains the "NVIDIA SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT". If I put this agreement in with the Chess Fighter download is that sufficient?

Have you read the license agreement ?

NVIDIA license agreement usually includes a line

2. GRANT OF LICENSE

2.1 Rights and Limitations of Grant. NVIDIA hereby grants Customer the following non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the SOFTWARE, with the following limitations:

with bunch of limitations that follow.

I would just direct people to the NVIDIA website link - my understanding is they are generally free to download anyway. Just my $.02 , I really don't care what you end up doing.