Final Release of Ethereal, V12.75

[Tony P.]

[5] Is Chess doomed to go the route of Shogi and Go? We share the Networks, but have our own searches? Is that okay?

The networks don't have to stay the same forever, especially now that the NNUE movement has proved that one can train a net from scratch at home, with no need to gather a community of testers of the Fishtest, Lc0 Training or even OpenBunch magnitude.

It's nice to have a strong working engine off the bat to test incremental tweaks, à la OpenBench, to search, training and net architectures, with an ultimate goal to see prettier chess played, with a touch of the author's own vision that the tweaks will bring, more so than with AB+HCE.

[mvanthoor]

Thinker, the shining beacon in a dark world:
http://www.talkchess.com/forum3/viewtop ... =2&t=52325

I don't really care... if an engine is not open source nowadays, I'm not interested in using or testing it. The only thing I noted is that I really liked the line that engine played, and that I would like my own engine to play such lines.

[Tony P.]

Ethereal has one of the most readable, cleanest codebases out there... I enjoyed reading it... plenty of comments in code, too...

it is not only one of the strongest engines, it's code is just beautiful... If I were to recommend to someone to clone/steal an engine codebase, it would be Ethereal...

Andrew's clarity ethic is rubbing off on the open source community Terje's and Fabi's cleanup of the FabChess code is a WIP, and so is its wiki.

Also, Arasan has traditionally been generously commented and has a detailed programmer guide. Jon Dart is the sensei of computer chess.

[Dann Corbit]

Ethereal has one of the most readable, cleanest codebases out there... I enjoyed reading it... plenty of comments in code, too...

it is not only one of the strongest engines, it's code is just beautiful... If I were to recommend to someone to clone/steal an engine codebase, it would be Ethereal...

Andrew's clarity ethic is rubbing off on the open source community Terje's and Fabi's cleanup of the FabChess code is a WIP, and so is its wiki.

Also, Arasan has traditionally been generously commented and has a detailed programmer guide. Jon Dart is the sensei of computer chess.

Don't forget Fabian's beautiful code and masterful use of assert().
I think Robert Hyatt deserves mention for Crafty. For some time, it was the strongest open source program.
I remember well the excitment of the Jakarta WCCC event.
I think a lot of programs gained valuable insights from Crafty as well.
Then there are the teachers. Bruce Moreland, Colin Frayn and Ed Schroder spring to mind. Their sites explained carefully how to write a chess engine. Probably a lot more valuable to a beginner than a steaming pile of source code.
http://web.archive.org/web/200708111827 ... topics.htm
http://www.frayn.net/beowulf/theory.html
https://rebel13.nl/rebel13/ideas.html

[towforce]

I've just had a think about what it means to make things, and now I find the whole thing rather amusing.

I like Flag Fen, near Peterborough in England: around 2000 years ago, it was a bronze age settlement, and now you can visit there and see how ancient Britons used to live. If they had spoken about making things, they would have meant it! The clothes on their backs were made from animal skins and threads from plants, stitched using tools they made themselves. Their huts were made from mud and sticks.

All you "Mr Makers" talking about making your own chess engines.

Did you solder any transistors to any circuit boards?

Did you generate your own electricity?

Did you write your own compilers?

Maybe you wrote your engines in machine code? Well some people have in the past.

Did you use any tools or libraries in the building of your program?

Did you use text editors to write your high level code, or did you use an IDE that SOMEBODY ELSE WROTE?

Did you write the operating system that your code runs under?

A huge number of people each did a huge amount of work to make your chess engine possible. The name of the REAL author is, "Market Economics".

Whatever work any of you have done to create your chess engines, in comparison to what bronze age Britons meant by "making", you did little more than screw it together.

You also complain that using an NN for eval is like giving the job to a calculator, but then wax lyrical about automatic valuation tuning tools you have built. How about being a bit more binary about things? Either you're writing and tuning the eval yourself or you're not.

People build their own cars from car kits. People make their own beer from beer kits. It's likely that the people who do these things enjoy doing them. Have you visited their houses to tell them they're not doing it properly? Ask yourself why you haven't done that.

[cdani]

Hello!
Nice effort and very nice results with your engine! I think we will see more neural nets in the engines soon, and they will be stronger than nnue alone
I use from time to time Ethreal to analyze positions of my ICCF games, as is different and a different point of view is valuable.
I wish you a happy life and projects. In any case whatever one thinks, is never absolute. One has to feel free, even of own one's words.

[Robert Flesher]

Hello all. Today I am releasing the final version of Ethereal, version 12.75, and ending development.

I'm leaving the Computer Chess Development world

Well done, kid. I’ll say to you what was said to me by one person many years ago, not much older than you then. I quit my safe teaching job after five years, they all thought I was crazy, what are you going to do? It’s a job for life and you just threw it up.
Pfah. I had no idea but I wasn’t doing that anymore, ever.
Then one day, about a week before end of term, job, career, I was walking through the staff room, past a woman teacher who usually was alone, never spoke, was kind of crippled somehow, she had trouble walking, needed callipers, English teacher, an outsider, always alone. Anyway I walked past her, same as every day for last N years, and she spoke: “well done, you are going to save your life”. Just a few words, often it’s the weird outsider ones who know the truth.
Good luck, don’t come back. Blow the bridges up behind yourself.

+1

[supersharp77]

Hello all. Today I am releasing the final version of Ethereal, version 12.75, and ending development. I'm also releasing a fork of Ethereal, Etherlito, which allows for using an NNUE network. The updated Ethereal has a massive elo gain of +43, compared to the previous gain of +17 from 12.25 to 12.50. This is largely due to my own innovative Pawn+King Neural Network, and Rook+Pawn+King Endgame Neural Network. Neither Network is "Updated Incrementally", and has absolutely no connection to Stockfish, Leela, or AlphaZero.

I've forked Ethereal to Etherlito, which will not be seeing any support or further commits. This allows you to place a weight file in the /src/ directory named "weights.nn", and compile. To make people happy, I've pasted a Stockfish net into the repo. One can compile out of the box, probably. You maybe have to play with the Makefile if you don't have a modern CPU.

Using various Networks, I am able to beat Stockfish 11 in a 500 game match by over +50 elo. Chess is dead. I'm not providing binaries for this, as Etherlito is the only code I've written in the last 6 years that I am ashamed of. I want everyone to know just how easy this was. 2 hours, 25 minutes. That is the time it took me to start by opening a tab to look at CFish, and to end by pushing a working version. Congrats to Stockfish for the incredible achievement. My middle finger to everyone else using it.

Binaries for Windows & Android (ARMv7, ARMv8) can be found here. As always, it is highly preferable for you to compile your own binary on your machine. A simple "make", or "make pext" (for those with Intel machines supporting the BMI2 instruction set), should produce a binary as fast and likely faster than the ones I provide. Of course, test it to be sure.


I'm likely to continue maintaining the OpenBench server's for the near future. However, I'm leaving the Computer Chess Development world, (although I'll be next door doing some work around Chess.com). Hopefully someone will take over if they are interested, or if Noobpwnftw cares to he can always host it.

Thanks to all of the old guard on these forums. I learned almost everything I know about chess, computer chess, and even programming in the pursuit of Ethereal. I got damn near the top. If you toss Houdini and Fire, I held the #3 spot in the world for a year. A testament to my obsession, and to the support of this community.

I'm not sure what to say as a closer. I can't find words to thank the many members of CCC for their contributions over the decades. I've been apart of the community for 6 years, but I don't see a future in this hobby. By this time next year, I expect to see Stockfish, Leela, and a bunch of forks or clones or near copy-paste jobs of them. Good luck. A republic, if you can keep it.

A wise man, one of the few true friends I've ever had, told me this: "fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra"

Sad news my friend...Of course the engine and testing world is greatly saddened by the loss of your Ethereal Project...believe it or not the very First Ethereal working copy is one of my favorite engines..not too deep of a searcher..
strength was around 2000-2200 elo.. this version rarely castled and played a very unique "Human Like Game" quite interesting...(reminded me of the unusual style of AliChess UCI perhaps I will construct a match and post the interesting results!) You threw down the gauntlet early in the pursuit of Stockfish (StockFish Dev Team) and of course you know you would be unsuccessful in topping them Yes?.. Hundreds and possibly thousands are working with SF and LC0 making continuous improvements daily...even Komodo and Houdini and Fritz (Chessbase) cannot keep pace! Don't be so hard on yourself..the pace was fast.. compare that first Ethereal to the latest versions.. think of how fast that pace was...and the time consumed? OMG..You have done WELL along with Andscacs..Rodent..Minic..Monolith & others..CONGRATS

ps (Stockfish chases itself..constantly in Motion)

pss Xiphos v0.6 has made the breakthrough vs Stockfish Engines

[Daniel Shawul]

http://web.archive.org/web/200708111827 ... topics.htm
http://www.frayn.net/beowulf/theory.html
https://rebel13.nl/rebel13/ideas.html

I get nostalagic feeling about these pages.
Even the webpage formats are stuck in my mind forever i think.

[JohnWoe]

I've just had a think about what it means to make things, and now I find the whole thing rather amusing.

I like Flag Fen, near Peterborough in England: around 2000 years ago, it was a bronze age settlement, and now you can visit there and see how ancient Britons used to live. If they had spoken about making things, they would have meant it! The clothes on their backs were made from animal skins and threads from plants, stitched using tools they made themselves. Their huts were made from mud and sticks.

All you "Mr Makers" talking about making your own chess engines.

Did you solder any transistors to any circuit boards?

Did you generate your own electricity?

Did you write your own compilers?

Maybe you wrote your engines in machine code? Well some people have in the past.

Did you use any tools or libraries in the building of your program?

Did you use text editors to write your high level code, or did you use an IDE that SOMEBODY ELSE WROTE?

Did you write the operating system that your code runs under?

A huge number of people each did a huge amount of work to make your chess engine possible. The name of the REAL author is, "Market Economics".

Whatever work any of you have done to create your chess engines, in comparison to what bronze age Britons meant by "making", you did little more than screw it together.

You also complain that using an NN for eval is like giving the job to a calculator, but then wax lyrical about automatic valuation tuning tools you have built. How about being a bit more binary about things? Either you're writing and tuning the eval yourself or you're not.

People build their own cars from car kits. People make their own beer from beer kits. It's likely that the people who do these things enjoy doing them. Have you visited their houses to tell them they're not doing it properly? Ask yourself why you haven't done that.

People who haven't build their own engines. Don't know the amount of low level details you need to take care of.