Chris Whittington's Chess System Tal!

[Tony Thomas]

Even if he signed a non-competition agreement, nothing is preventing him from releasing an engine under an alias (Goat).

[Michael Sherwin]

Even if he signed a non-competition agreement, nothing is preventing him from releasing an engine under an alias (Goat).

Yes Tony, I saw his avatar. But this is not the place to allow your associative reverse scitzoid paranoia to get the best of you!

[mclane]

IMO i would say: yes.

rollason sells a clone of CSTAL from the link you gave.

[mclane]

imo chris lost interest in writing another chess program.
something that has happened to many others in the scene.

Romi is doing between 3.300-3900 KNPS while CSTAL is doing 100 KNPS
on the Core2quad.

[chrisw]

[snip]No problem for me - this stuff is not in any way my property any more. Not really very sure who owns it now, maybe the liquidator - for sure somebody owns it, ownership doesn't just vaporise into thin air.

Hi Chris,

Didn't Jeff Rollason over at AI Factory (www.aifactory.co.uk) buy the source code and rights to CS Tal and all of the old Oxford Software apps? They certainly sell a chess program called CS Tal on their website.

Cheers,

Steve Maughan

Hi Steve,

Did AI Factory acquire all the rights and ownership or did it just licence stuff from the liquidator on a royalty basis? If the former, AI Factory can do what it wants with the assets, if the latter then it would seem natural that there would be some qualifying controls. One would need sight of the contract / terms of deal AI Factory-liquidator to determine.

Best wishes,

Chris

[chrisw]

Chris:
If you feel it is no proper to do what I said I could do, just tell me and I will not do it.
Or perhaps the receiver of the copied stuff could deliver to you the book you choose? That would be another way...
I do not pretend to get a profit of this. I have given many things for not even the cheap book as a compliment, but simply these days I cannot do it anymore due to financial problems. A $5 book just cover PART of my post expenses, the package, etc. In terms of my motivations, you know well I have been a fan of Cstal since lot of time, even writing some stuff about it as you surely remember. So when I offer to do this, with the investment of time of copying a disk, going to the stationary to get an envelope, then to the post office, etc, I do it to keep the flame .
But, again, if you feel different, just let me know.
Truly yours
Your friend Fernando.

Hi Fernando,

No problem for me - this stuff is not in any way my property any more. Not really very sure who owns it now, maybe the liquidator - for sure somebody owns it, ownership doesn't just vaporise into thin air.

I do know there are some very sore venture capitalists out there who lost around £16mn of investment, and they might just love the opportunity to sue someone (via the liquidator) to recoup some few shekels.

Beware of sharks is my advice.

Your old friend,

Chris

Hi Chris,

Did you sign a non-competition agreement? If so, when does it expire?

If you are not (now) under an agreement to not write another chess program then what is stopping you from writing one?

Hi Michael,

It was a lot more complicated than a non-competition agreement. Those venture capitalists make it way more certain than that. Part of the way it was done was to pay me a large yearly consultancy fee so that anything I produced would belong to them. Therefore I produced nothing and became a farmer instead.

When they went bust the consultancy fee (paid monthly) ceased.

So, to answer your question, there is nothing contractual now stopping me from writing another chess program. Instead I got interested in neural networks, wrote one in C that I can control all parameters of several years ago (did various things with that including a mega-strong Backgammon, also tried RRKK but it was not much good) but am now playing around with historical stockmarket data to see what transpires.

Best wishes,

Chris

[chrisw]

IMO i would say: yes.

rollason sells a clone of CSTAL from the link you gave.

I would say: Yes, but.

[chrisw]

Even if he signed a non-competition agreement, nothing is preventing him from releasing an engine under an alias (Goat).

Well, nothing prevents me now, but plenty prevented me between 2000-2003.

If I'ld tried that at the time, I'ld have rapidly been on the receiving end of writs from Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne.

[Tord Romstad]

So, to answer your question, there is nothing contractual now stopping me from writing another chess program. Instead I got interested in neural networks, wrote one in C that I can control all parameters of several years ago (did various things with that including a mega-strong Backgammon, also tried RRKK but it was not much good) but am now playing around with historical stockmarket data to see what transpires.

Hello Chris,

I vaguely remember that you also talked about writing a shogi program many years back. Did you ever do that, or were the plans abandoned?

I've been wanting to work seriously on computer shogi for a long time, but unfortunately people will never let me stop working on my chess program.

Tord

[chrisw]

imo chris lost interest in writing another chess program.
something that has happened to many others in the scene.

Romi is doing between 3.300-3900 KNPS while CSTAL is doing 100 KNPS
on the Core2quad.

Thorsten,

I used to like writing engines and chess engines, it was my hobby and also my means of making enough money to pay bunches of extremely expensive bills. Double motivation.

Now I have the money and my children (mostly) no longer require the payment of expensive school fee bills, I have what I need and no desire to acquire gadgets or useless material assets, the "make money" motivation is no longer existent. In any case, I don't think it's possible to make money out of computer chess - this fell to a very small number of lucky programmers, some academic careers and to some who built retail businesses on the back of it all. I doubt either group could do this now.

Also, the age 30's and part of 40's is a time for doing, one can learn new things fast and apply skills well. Older 40's and 50's is more a time for managing others, taking overviews and so on. This age is much more broad brush guiding others and much less specialised skilled work.

So, I moved on to other things.

Chris