It's funny to see you defend this, because Scorpio is going to be crushed by the NNUE flood and low-effort eval copies.
Daniel Shawul wrote: ↑Sat Oct 10, 2020 11:08 pm
Alayan wrote: ↑Sat Oct 10, 2020 10:41 pm
So many ways of copying other engines/architectures are completely fine to make your hobby engine but are not fine to compete at TCEC and shouldn't be fine to be presented in rating lists as if original engines.
To be fair to TCEC their rule says the NNUE infrastructure is considered a library.
Guidelines for use of NNUE at TCEC:
1) NNUE code can be used and considered as if it was a library (even if it is not literally one).
2) Custom modifications to the basic NNUE code are strongly encouraged, it should be considered rather like a starting point.
3) All NNUE training data should be generated by the unique engine's own search and/or eval code.
Do the NNUE guidelines apply outside NNUE technology?
No, of course not.
It sounds to me like they want to encourage variety and experimentation with NNUE but do not want to insist eveybody reinvents the wheel (the NN inference code). I don't agree with their third rule i.e. don't use SF data. But I don't belive you need to invent a new NNUE architecture to be original. Btw what exactly is this "NNUE archtecture" anwyay ? It is a highly-optimized 3-layer dense network. I hear the incremental update gains only about 11% speedup , so their is really not much originality left if you drop that for example.
If they wanted to encourage variety and experimentation, they should require architectural innovations. Copying the net architecture with king-pieces input (which also makes it easy to copy SF nets) has no originality.
It's not more original in any way than copying the full evaluation code of Stockfish classical, resetting all parameters to 0, and tuning them independently.
Daniel Shawul wrote: ↑Sat Oct 10, 2020 11:08 pm
So they find themselves in a rough spot. Allie was just one engine, now they're facing a flood of NNUEs. If 10 engines copy-paste the same NNUE architecture and copy SF nets because "numbers are not the property of anybody", the whole competition is a farce. 80% of the engines effective originality is gone.
The cudnn backend of Allie shared with lc0 can be considered a library too... Ankan actually gave explicit permission to Allie author AFAIK.
Someone (i think twoforce) summarized it very well. If you have the need to be _really_ original you have got to write the linux kernel, the cuda driver etc which doesn't make any sense. I recently wanted to update to cudnn-v8 but was stomped to find out its size has more than tripled and now stands at 1.2 GB. I can't fathom the amount of optimization and human hours spent on producing this library. I am just a mere user of this library and I don't need to reinvent the wheel when the focus of the competiion is AI-chess ?
Allie has all rights to exist. Violates no license, no moral rules, nothing. Should it compete in tournaments ? I think the lack of originality on eval and the lack of originality in search (because it uses the exact same policy system to guide its search, making its search more similar to Leela's than 2 AB's engine searches are to each other...), arguably not.
The linux kernel and cuda driver argument is completely stupid. They aren't part of the chess program and don't contribute to chess move selection at all.
The issue with what Allie uses from Leela isn't being able to use GPU efficiently, it's that the net architecture is copy-pasted making the engine behavior much more similar.