Hart wrote:To you and everybody else, thanks for the information and resources. I am sure it will help plenty.
On a different note, I am curious why there are no very successful group collaboration efforts in computer chess. I see lots of independent programs but few by a team or group. Is this just the nature of the beast and group efforts are too inefficient to produce something as high quality? What I think would be interesting is a simple and very modular chess program where the different parts of the program (eval, search, qs, move order, etc) are modular in nature and any one person could take the work in progress or a part of it, and supplant it with their own ideas and see how it performs relative to the best performance by the original. Is there such a thing already? If not who will help me create such a thing... Has this been tried and failed?
mh
You raise a few very interesting questions Michael.
With respect to teams that both program a chessprogram, i guess the odds is just tiny that 2 good programmers meet and form a team. Usually if there is a team it is a kind of division of tasks between one of them being the programmer of the team, like Shay seems to be for junior, or Bart Weststrate for Kallisto, and the other member doing either the operation at tournaments and/or book, like Bart's brother who used to operate Kallisto at Dutch events and doing book, and Amir who is operating junior always.
One of the major problems i guess in teaming up for a chessprogram is the hard fact that most programmers work completely at inconsequent times at their program, and majority has never in life managed to live a life of starting work at 9 AM and finishing at 5 PM.
Try to have a cooperation in sparetime between 2 of those guys, for many hours a week.
That is very hard to accomplish.
With respect to your other viewpoint on modular design. Nearly all chessprograms have been designed modular. That is sure not the problem.
Diep for sure isn't world's worst program. I'd argue it's eval is the best a program has on this planet. In past years i've several times offered (without asking money by the way) this to several groups of researchers who wanted to research a specific area of interest.
The compare then is interesting how diep on a PC with its normal search, compares to some scientific project that claim to parallellize well.
Amazingly in all the cases i had offered this over the past 14 years, not a single time the person( s ) in question replied onto the offer and continued asking further to figure out an easy method to try to perform the experiment.
I've concluded myself that in its pure nature most scientists who start in computerchess a new project in order to 'kick butt' have the intention to earn some coins with it, or simply don't want to get measured by objective standards.
If you and i would use the same evaluation function, then it is very easy to test which of the 2 searchers is performing better. So bullshit research
is a little bit harder if i get 14 ply with diep and find all best moves within 1 minute a position, and the researcher at 16 processors gets 18 ply with his 'new interesting algorithm' and just solves half of them because of dubious pruning.
It is a simple fact that if you test with a bit stronger program, that many tricks and enhancements no longer work, which do work on big crap software, as any random change there might work.
Vincent