Why I stood up for Allie is why I stand up for FF2

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto]

that the GPU/CUDA Portion that it shared in common with Lc0 was a) very small

LUL.

"The work I take from others is very small and insignificant, the work I do myself is highly valuable and original."

[AndrewGrant]

It was not so long ago that the usual suspects were screaming “clone” at the author of Allie. Never mind that the vast majority of Allie was original and distinctive from Lc0, or that the GPU/CUDA Portion that it shared in common with Lc0 was a) very small, b) not chess specific, c) blessed for use by the author of that code. I stood up for Allie and defended it against these same bullies and GPL misinterpreters.

Why? Computer Chess should never become a cool kids club where only those who are favored are permitted to play.

Turns out when you don't lie and attempt to deceive people, they tend to be okay with you, especially when you contribute something back and make an effort to be apart of the community and have some innovations on your own.

Who knew! Maybe Albert could try this too?

[mvanthoor]

Fat Fritz 2 on the other hand is a blatant Stockfish clone, Albert Silver having taken 99.9% of Stockfish's existing codebase and trying to pass it off as his own work. You might as well defend the actions of Robert Houdart and Norman Schmidt for trying to pass off Stockfish 8 as their own work.

Even the fact that Fat Fritz 2 is a Stockfish clone, is not a problem in itself.

Selling free software

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

- Chessbase could grab Stockfish, change it a little bit where they want to, and make that change public.
- They can train their own neural network.
- Then they stick it in the ChessProgramGUI version 17.

They call it Fat Fritz 2, and ask €79 for it.

When tested, it turns out to be 15 Elo stronger than the default Stockfish version X at the moment.

So, Chessbase can say: We now have the strongest chess engine. We took Stockfish, changed it, and provided our own network. You can have this engine for €79. In addition, you get our world-famous Office-like user interface with it, and 3 different opening books each with XX numbers of half-moves.

They could also say: We have a world-renowned Office-like user interface to run chess engines. You get 3 different opening books with it, created from our Mega Database, each with their own playing style. Within this interface runs a modified version of Stockfish, provided with a neural network trained by us. It is +15 Elo compared to the default version 12 of Stockfish.

Both are absolutely fine. You're paying for:
- Having everything packaged up in an installer
- Getting a good user-interface (this is a matter of taste obviously).
- Getting to run Chessbase's version of a neural network
- Having 3 opening books shipped with the GUI

You, as a user, can decide if it's worth it to pay €79 for this.

I think the entire problem is the fact that Chessbase and/or Albert Silver present the engine as if it is completely their work. Apart from training the network, it isn't. That's where the problem lies; not in the fact that the engine is actually Stockfish, and Chessbase sells it together with their GUI.

[towforce]

I think the entire problem is the fact that Chessbase and/or Albert Silver present the engine as if it is completely their work. Apart from training the network, it isn't. That's where the problem lies; not in the fact that the engine is actually Stockfish, and Chessbase sells it together with their GUI.

IMO Chessbase are also creating a "brand stretch" issue for themselves. When a company chooses to stretch a brand (a well known example in recent decades is that many sports car companies started selling people carriers), marketing experts say that the short term consequence will be increased profits, but the long term cost will be loss of brand value.

I am not sure what buyers of FF software see in the brand (maybe the value lies with Chessbase as a chess "department store"), but badging free software and selling it for a high price can only be hurting it.

[mvanthoor]

I am not sure what buyers of FF software see in the brand (maybe the value lies with Chessbase as a chess "department store"), but badging free software and selling it for a high price can only be hurting it.

Convenience. When you want to use the strongest engine, you'll have to:

- Download the engine.
- Download Arena (which, for Windows, hasn't been developed for over 5 years), or a different user interface.
- Install Arena, and then find out how to install the engine.
- If you don't like the opening book, you'll have to scrounge the internet for an Arena-specific opening book you like (and then find out how to install THAT)
- Then download the table-bases... somewhere. And then install them... somehow.

When you buy something like Fat Fritz 2, you just:
- Buy the product
- Install the program

Wham. Done. And you have a PDF manual with it, explaining how everything works, and you have a GUI that most chess players are familiar with. If you need support, you can either mail Chessbase, or search on the internet, because basically every chess player who's ever used a computer (who is not an engine author/programmer, etc) will have used or is using Chessbase software.

And thus:

Chessbase has become the Adobe/Microsoft of the chess world. If you're just a normal person (not computer savvy) wanting to do something with chess software, you use Chessbase: everything else is just crap in the margin. Same as when you're a graphics professional. You use Adobe products. Even if there are products that are NEARLY replacements (such as the Affinity programs), you STILL don't use them, because they're NOT Photoshop/Indesign/Illustrator. If you use anything else, you won't be compatible with everyone else. If you need an Office suite in the workplace, you use MS Office; LibreOffice is great (I use it for personal use), but you HAVE TO use Outlook/MSWord/Excel because everybody else uses it. Even if you don't WANT to use Whatsapp and would rather use something else, you can't, because everybody you need to talk to is on Whatsapp; and whatsapp only.

It's called the Network Effect.

[noobpwnftw]

Convenience.

The same can be achieved by CB just bundling with "Stock"fish, minus one scammer, ending up being the real number 1, causing no shitstorm heading their way, no?

I think for those CB people, deep down they know it, they just hate the fact that best chess engines being OSS but cannot resist the temptations, therefore their natural solution is to find some morally questionable "developer" to actually do this.

[mvanthoor]

The same can be achieved by CB just bundling with "Stock"fish, minus one scammer, ending up being the real number 1, causing no shitstorm heading their way, no?

I think for those CB people, deep down they know it, they just hate the fact that best chess engines being OSS but cannot resist the temptations, therefore their natural solution is to find some morally questionable "developer" to actually do this.

To some extent I agree that Chessbase should just stop marketing "Fritz" as an engine, as the engine named as such saw its last version as Deep Fritz 13 in 2013. "Fritz" 14 was actually Pandix, 15 and 16 was what Rybka 4.1 and 4.2 would have been, and 17 is (IIRC) Gingko, which are all private engines.

Chessbase should rename their GUI to something else. Then do something like this:

- Rip out everything that has to do with strength settings, and adapt it to work with with UCI_Elo and UCI_LimitStrength (just as Shredder's GUI does)
- Bundle an unmodified Stockfish 12 or 13 with it, and maybe 2-3 other open source engines that have Elo and LimitStrength implemented, in different strength brackets.
- For an engine that can go very weak, take Texel 1.07, add UCI_Elo and UCI_LimitStrength as mappings to Texel's "Strength" setting, and bundle this engine as well. (Including the source code.)

Then sell all of that as a package. If they fix the last few glitches in their user interface, I'd actually buy this, because the Chessbase GUI's are the only ones that REALLY support the DGT-board well. Next to PicoChess, but that has no GUI, and requiers quite some technical skill, if you're not going with the DGT Pi.

Ah, case in point... the DGT Pi. That clock is a DGT-3000 with a Raspberry 3 built in, which runs Linux/PicoChess. DGT has added code to PicoChess to be able to interface the clock directly with the Pi. This code is open source, and one of the DGT employees hangs around the PicoChess group. If there are problems, he looks into them... even if people are replacing the Pi3 with a Pi4 in the clock. (He probably does this in his own time.)

DGT does provide an image for their DGT Pi however.

The clock costs €269, which is €200 on top of the DGT-3000. So you pay €200 for a PicoChess image, and a Raspberry Pi. What do you get for this?

- A one-piece device that can be connected by Bluetooth if you want to.
- No computer or Pi needed next to the chess board: only the DGT Pi / clock, the board, and you
- A manual that explains everything
- Support if it doesn't work (with their own image)
- Downloadable image with instructions on how to flash it should you break the DGT Pi somehow
- Two years of warranty.
- If you just unpack the DGT Pi, you connect it to the board, and done... no expertise needed.
- The clock can display 11 characters instead of 8 when directly interfacing with the Pi, instead of through the board.

Is all of that worth €200? People can make up their minds themselves. I want more control, and I don't mind the extra Pi next to the board, so I have a Pi4 in a nice ArgonOne case, and a normal DGT3000 clock. I built my own PicoChess image from scratch (it even has SSH, FTP, Samba, VNC), and I use a PicoChess version, based on the last free 0.9N, that was modified by myself to fix some issues.

For me, the DGT Pi is not worth the extra €200, because I don't want to be dependent on the DGT clock/pi connection code (which is finicky and can change between clock revisions), but I can see why people do like the DGT Pi.

With the DGT Pi, you know exactly what you're getting when you buy it. You COULD actually buy a DGT 3000, a Pi 3 or 4, get out the soldering iron to connect them (and also 3D-print a new bottom case for the Pi so it fits the clock), and then start building your image including the open source DGT code to interface the Pi with the clock directly. It will cost you a lot of time though. If you can't do it within a day or 2 (and I doubt anyone coming to this fresh can), then €200 extra to have all of this work done upfront actually starts to sound quite amicable.

If DGT would actually release a DGT Pi II, made from real wood (not the faux-wooden print of the DGT 3000 Limited Edition), and include a nice dimmable blue (or green) LCD-screen such as the Technics keyboards had in the 90's but smaller, instead of that dinky 70's segmented display, then I'd actually buy it.

[cpeters]

Chessbase should rename their GUI to something else. Then do something like this:

- Rip out everything that has to do with strength settings, and adapt it to work with with UCI_Elo and UCI_LimitStrength (just as Shredder's GUI does)
- Bundle an unmodified Stockfish 12 or 13 with it, and maybe 2-3 other open source engines that have Elo and LimitStrength implemented, in different strength brackets.
- For an engine that can go very weak, take Texel 1.07, add UCI_Elo and UCI_LimitStrength as mappings to Texel's "Strength" setting, and bundle this engine as well. (Including the source code.)

D'accord. And try to talk with the GPU (many Fritz afficionados bought massive rigs for Fritz 17/lc0...[1]) for the ray-traced boards in the future...

Chessbase has become the Adobe/Microsoft of the chess world.

This seems also true. I think they're sitting on a massive pile of legacy-crap and win-cruft/dependency code - there can't be no other explanation why they're unable to rebuild a functionating (open cbv ...) less bug-ridden chessbase thingy with appealing (nonribbon'ed) design for the 'mobile' platforms.

If they don't move, they''ll be marginalized/vanish in no time.


[1]https://de.chessbase.com/post/fat-fritz ... raucht-man
"zwei Mal 2080 zu kaufen" l0l

[mvanthoor]

This seems also true. I think they're sitting on a massive pile of legacy-crap and win-cruft/dependency code - there can't be no other explanation why they're unable to rebuild a functionating (open cbv ...) less bug-ridden chessbase thingy with appealing (nonribbon'ed) design for the 'mobile' platforms.

The problem is that since Fritz 12 (which I avoided due to having to active the program, and the addition of cloud options I don't need), the improvements to the GUI are very incremental; it's only more cloud stuff, and more online functionality.

The GUI has problems on monitors where scaling is not set to 100% (good luck with your 4K screen on a 13 inch laptop). The problems become bigger as the scaling becomes larger (no pun intended).
The GUI also has problems when you don't set the font size to 100%. Text in some spaces doesn't fit, or the GUI scales in weird ways.

If you combine both, you're going to be in for one hell of a tough ride to make it usable.

Fritz 11 (pre-ribbon GUI) with the next to last update (from june 2009) is the best GUI Chessbase ever built. EVERYTHING works: it supports the old and new Chessbase format engines, and UCI engines. There are no bugs that I know of; at least no bugs that I am aware of. (Why not use the latest update? Because they tried to backport features from the Fritz 12 GUI onto 11, and majorly failed and broke the program.)

That's the reason why I have been using the Fritz 11 GUI for 13 years. The only reasons to not use it nowadays is:
- If you need monitor scaling or font scaling, it doesn't always work well; because this GUI was written in a time where these things were not really an issue.
- If you want to use a Mac or Linux.

Chessbase itself obviously uses the same GUI/Widgets as the Fritz GUI, and has many of the same problems.

If they're not doing anything with the GUI, they must do something with the engines or the database software, or everything will become stagnant, and that is the beginning of the end for a software company.

Personally, I think Chessbase should spit their backend code from the GUI, and where this is not possible, rewrite it, and put a new, modern GUI on top. Write it in Electron/Angular for all I care. Modern, portable, cross-platform. It's not incredibly fast and takes quite a bit of resources, but if I can run Visual Studio without issues on a 5 year old computer (and on another 6 year old computer that has about half the speed of the other computer), I'll be able to run a chess interface as well.

Chessbase could then focus on maintaining a very good database program. It _IS_ much more user friendly than SCID or SCID vs. PC (What kind of a name is that, anyway?), and a very good modern GUI (I'm not the biggest fan of Arena, even though it is the next best thing). They shouldn't be doing chess engines anymore; just bundle the open source engines and be done with it.

As a niche-company, you can't compete with people who throw hundreds and hundreds of hours into programming a chess engine, and donate thousands or millions of computer hours, FOR FREE as a labor of love. People do this for chess engines, but not for user-friendly user interfaces and databases. THAT's where Chessbase's efforts would pay off.

Well... uh... it's exactly the thing they began with... now that I think of it. Writing Chessbase, and the first "Chessbase look-a-like" GUI on top of the original Fritz...

[maksimKorzh]

This seems also true. I think they're sitting on a massive pile of legacy-crap and win-cruft/dependency code - there can't be no other explanation why they're unable to rebuild a functionating (open cbv ...) less bug-ridden chessbase thingy with appealing (nonribbon'ed) design for the 'mobile' platforms.

The problem is that since Fritz 12 (which I avoided due to having to active the program, and the addition of cloud options I don't need), the improvements to the GUI are very incremental; it's only more cloud stuff, and more online functionality.

The GUI has problems on monitors where scaling is not set to 100% (good luck with your 4K screen on a 13 inch laptop). The problems become bigger as the scaling becomes larger (no pun intended).
The GUI also has problems when you don't set the font size to 100%. Text in some spaces doesn't fit, or the GUI scales in weird ways.

If you combine both, you're going to be in for one hell of a tough ride to make it usable.

Fritz 11 (pre-ribbon GUI) with the next to last update (from june 2009) is the best GUI Chessbase ever built. EVERYTHING works: it supports the old and new Chessbase format engines, and UCI engines. There are no bugs that I know of; at least no bugs that I am aware of. (Why not use the latest update? Because they tried to backport features from the Fritz 12 GUI onto 11, and majorly failed and broke the program.)

That's the reason why I have been using the Fritz 11 GUI for 13 years. The only reasons to not use it nowadays is:
- If you need monitor scaling or font scaling, it doesn't always work well; because this GUI was written in a time where these things were not really an issue.
- If you want to use a Mac or Linux.

Chessbase itself obviously uses the same GUI/Widgets as the Fritz GUI, and has many of the same problems.

If they're not doing anything with the GUI, they must do something with the engines or the database software, or everything will become stagnant, and that is the beginning of the end for a software company.

Personally, I think Chessbase should spit their backend code from the GUI, and where this is not possible, rewrite it, and put a new, modern GUI on top. Write it in Electron/Angular for all I care. Modern, portable, cross-platform. It's not incredibly fast and takes quite a bit of resources, but if I can run Visual Studio without issues on a 5 year old computer (and on another 6 year old computer that has about half the speed of the other computer), I'll be able to run a chess interface as well.

Chessbase could then focus on maintaining a very good database program. It _IS_ much more user friendly than SCID or SCID vs. PC (What kind of a name is that, anyway?), and a very good modern GUI (I'm not the biggest fan of Arena, even though it is the next best thing). They shouldn't be doing chess engines anymore; just bundle the open source engines and be done with it.

As a niche-company, you can't compete with people who throw hundreds and hundreds of hours into programming a chess engine, and donate thousands or millions of computer hours, FOR FREE as a labor of love. People do this for chess engines, but not for user-friendly user interfaces and databases. THAT's where Chessbase's efforts would pay off.

Well... uh... it's exactly the thing they began with... now that I think of it. Writing Chessbase, and the first "Chessbase look-a-like" GUI on top of the original Fritz...

Hi Marcel

I enjoyed reading all of your posts within this thread. If only marketing experts read it as well...
if 1... 2... 3... then I would buy it - those feedbacks were really valuable. If I was a developer of the listed products I would definitely cared about it.