A free-thinker, living in China, - a good place for it -, preaches about human base motivations and some small-minded populations. Stir 'em up, you can read between the lines. Brendan, you dare something : )
PaulieD wrote:
Why is everyone so dead set against Norman Schmidt (Firefather)!
What the hell did he do to you to deserve this kind of condescending attitude?
Let he who never sinned cast the first stone. You hippocrites.
Brendan J. Norman wrote
Probably jealousy and insecurity.
When a strong muscular guy walks past a fat guy and his girlfriend, what does the fat guy say to his girlfriend?
They say: "Obviously on steroids...It's disgusting how to roid freaks abuse their bodies!" while inside knowing that they'd die to have the same physique and their girlfriend would die to...
I have met them; The athlete is a chess player and the girlfriend loves her fatty deep and dearly : )
Brendan J. Norman wrote
In all areas of life there are bitter people who pull down others to prop up their own fragile ego...the chess world is packed with these people.
Ugh, what a dwarfed pack. But no.. Bobby Fisher isn't a collective. The population is too general, too inhomogeneous defined. What groups do you mean: professionals, world champions, amateurs, hobby players, occasional players, programmers, engine testers, internet fora, user groups, business men, journalists ? I don't put them in a box, only based on what they are saying and doing in a forum.
One of the first steps to come to substantiated and significant statements about human behaviour is classification, you have to define sub-populations. Your personal experiences, -with all due respect-, are individual cases and you should report it as such ones.
With your rudimentary empirical understanding you can also suspect the chess people - based on personal observations -, gathering a high percentage of nose pickers, particularly among the engine testers. The reason: they all are searchers and want to get to the bottom of the things. This seems very logical to me, isn't it ; )
Brendan J. Norman wrote
I really get the feeling that a lot of people on this forum don't even play/enjoy chess anymore, but rather, spend 90% of their time running B.S tests to see whose engine is "original"
And what, if they like it? Ok, partially agreed, look at the plagiarism-hunters. Not a joke! You must know, in some countries, -Germany for instance -, intellectual property is a great good and plagiarism is forbidden by law. And it's not only paragraphs; it's a real hunting of the sinners in the highest public and political positions. Even some heads of ministers must roll because the quoting in their dissertations wasn't carefully enough. And, boon and bane of the internet, the hunting fever came over the people. With marked text from the freely available dissertations (stored in university libraries) they gathered lotsa text hits in the depth of the WWW Maybe, a national or even a worldwide passion has arisen.
There is a hard core of members in the forum, with a few followers, a kind of vigilant home guard in the background, who feel inspired to engine investigation (where is Olivier Deville, actually?)
Question: they do it just for fun, revenge or hunting fever? Are they busybodies, do they suffer of an image neurosis or they do it for the benefit of the community? The last group is following the motto: we don't wanna be bluffed and fooled with fraudulent labelling?
It's difficult to look inside a person and to interpret the structure and the ranking of the motivations. Human behaviour is not one-dimensional but a resultant of a bunch of motivations.
Nevertheless, I confess that a strong engine from the scratch is my ideal as a user and tester too? It's my individual pleasure to know what parts of the code come from whom. As said by others before, it is basically nonsense running tournaments when the programs nearly are the same but the engines and authors have a different name. So it does indeed make a sense spending a lot of time running tests to see whose engine is original.
BTW, I have no problems with chess friends who don't give a damn who has mixed what engine-cocktail, shaken or stirred. As long as they do not dictate me what is the right way ^_-
Nevertheless, it seems not very professional to me, what all get poured over the author of Fire. I'm afraid that the applied methods and tools are rather modest and insufficient. It looks hobby like, far away from science, No concept, no coordination and cooperation, a lot of unqualified, incomprehensible, prejudiced talk. My recommendation: the inspectors should constitute a work group. Outlandish hypotheses and overvalued indications about what the author all could have done for encrypting his copy and paste festival. Nobody calls here for scientific knowhow and precision, normally. But if a man's work and person is touched, then the requirements should be much higher.
To qualify as an inspector you must not only group together when Norman Schmidt comes around the corner. They should appear more often and with other engines too. There is a great risk to overburden the body of evidence, speak Fire 5, and "camp thinking" is a bad counsellor. I haven't read all posts but I only can identify Alexander Schmidt as a man who is trying differentiation.
I've said "from the scratch is an ideal" because it is hardly to put in practice nowadays. So they have now detected Stockfish instead of Ippolit in the code. What a surprise! The best of all engines is open source and most of the authors have found their way to combine it with their own creativity and program-technical skill. The Fire-programmer don't considers his creation as GPL-obligatory and rightly so. As said before, suspicion and distrust must be confirmed on the highest level of evidence. The reliability and validity of the used detection software is to be attested with objective studies and hobby detectives should act in a very modest and restrained manner.
And Norman Schmidt? What once is conditioned is very hard to desensitize. But he won't shoot for failing once. It's a longer story to understand the emotional background. As matters stand you can see live in the thread. You can read what they want him to do and that he believes there is enough already been done. Keeping cool is the best what he can do for his health. Of course I'm testing Fire 5 !
Brendan J. Norman wrote
Do you guys even go over the games the engines play?
Bingo, you've caught me. But I regret it, I really regret it. I like it so much watching the splitted screen with endless move lines, evaluation profiles, kN/sec and of course, the game on the board. Then I'm a grandmaster and what the machine plays I would have played too, of course. But what should I do when wasting my time with such long reports #-)
Brendan J. Norman wrote
Or just leave the "test" on overnight and export the crosstable/engine "comparison" the following day.
The engine tester must do that, for how else he can get the confidence interval as small as possible. Variance is a bitch, Robert Houdart said it.
Brendan J. Norman wrote
There is little chess beauty involved at all (you've removed all the aesthetics)...it's just a big ego-gratification game.
"OMG! Fire/Strelka/Vitruvius/Gull/Thinker/Rybka/(insert almost any 3000+ engine) is a clone/derivative! Call the police! What a terrible thing! I ran a 10,000 game match between (engine 1) and (engine 2) and (engine 1) is CLEARLY a clone of..."
Jeez...If I go into the forum history, some people have been doing this for YEARS and YEARS.
Guess what? Nothing is going to change.
I've tried to comment this above.
Yes, I can understand why you see it as an abuse of the Royal Game and I can see how you are suffering from it.
Brendan J. Norman wrote
I learnt even at 10 years old: "Don't complain about something you cannot change - it's wasted energy you can use elsewhere"
That's a reversible wisdom. You can also say, try to change what you complain. Decide for the version according to your temperament and your individual view of the world.
Brendan J. Norman wrote
Why not get back to enjoying chess?
Here's how:
1.Delete all of your "latest" SF1313116 builds.
2. Run a SF8/Fire5/Shredder 13/Houdini 5 gauntlet against Fritz 7, Junior 7, Hiarcs 8 Bareev, Shredder 6PB, Ktulu 7.1 and ChessTiger 14 at 5/2 Time Control with a book of sharp lines.
3. Grab a glass of wine
4. Enjoy the bloodbath.
My respect for your proper web site and your wonderful job teaching English and chess in China
