It walks like a clone, it quacks like a clone ...

[Madeleine Birchfield]

This discussion has gone off the original topic, so I have broken this topic off into a different topic entirely: http://talkchess.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=76858

Continue talking about rating lists and clones.

[mvanthoor]

What exactly is the incentive to help people who come into the forum working on their first ever move generator? Obviously its a kind thing to do.

If someone who knows all the tricks of the trade thinks himself to be too good to help people just starting out, he's forgotten the fact that some time ago, he himself had to start somewhere.

To be honest, I could have had my engine in the 3000+ range already. I could have just written the move generator and alpha-beta functions, and then go around the stronger engines, taking the tapered evaluation from there, evaluation terms from here, and some prunings from one or the other search function. Easy enough to build a strong engine that way. Especially if I had chosen C or C++.

I didn't want to. I chose Rust, a programming language I didn't know a lot about when I started using it, and I chose to research the topics in chess programming from the very basics and write everything from scratch myself. Thus, at some points, I needed help.

A high-up-there discord server where people discuss the latest in neural networks is not the place to find information. A forum like this is; the 20-30 years of archived posts in forums like this, and newsgroups, is the place to find that information. Maybe, at some point in time, I'll end up on a discord server... but I doubt it. I do not have the time nor the motivation to start researching ways to gain 10 Elo and then play 50.000 games to see if it's actually a gain.

As soon as I feel my engine is going to take too much work and too much computing power to improve, I'd rather help other people getting started with THEIR first engine.

The old techniques won't go away: knowing how to write algorithms such as tree search are useful for many other games and applications. Writing this chess engine has taught mu much more than only chess programming, and gave me the chance to use and write things I'd not write during a normal working day.

Maybe you can argue it helps bring more people into the community, which is a net gain in the long run. But on an individual level, why should I, or a Stockfish dev, or someone else spend the time weeding through someone's first ever chess code with hundreds of lines to hunt down their bugs for them?

You don't, but you can at least point out the pitfalls which people need to take into account.

[mvanthoor]

I think you missed his point. Top engine devs are not lurking around in the talkchess subforums anymore. They are in discord servers. Whether that be Stockfish, Leela, or smaller ones like their own Koivisto one or OpenBench's discord.

I think that's a pity. Discord is a chat program and the signal to noise ratio is usually very low. It is not a good place to preserve information (there are no threads for example). Sadly many people seem addicted to it.

This too. Where can you find 20-30 YEARS worth of information in Discord?

When googling for something, I invariably ended up in the CCC newsgroup, or on Talkchess, and except for a very minor instances, I found all the information I needed in sometimes VERY old posts.

[Marek Soszynski]

Pardon my ignorance, but if the FatFritz2 code is on GitHub, why can't other developers incorporate the section that accesses the double-sized network into their own Stockfish forks and derivatives (suitably licensed)? That is, to offer the option of network size handling.

[Ras]

That is, to offer the option of network size handling.

The NNUE format should be extended to contain the description of the network architecture. That would allow to plug in any network to any engine.

[Sopel]

The information is contained in the network file. Not knowing the network size on compile time is a pessimisation. And it's trivial to modify stockfish and recompile for other networks. Further, there's little benefit to using a different network if it's not better.

[IanKennedy]

I think you missed his point. Top engine devs are not lurking around in the talkchess subforums anymore. They are in discord servers. Whether that be Stockfish, Leela, or smaller ones like their own Koivisto one or OpenBench's discord.

I think that's a pity. Discord is a chat program and the signal to noise ratio is usually very low. It is not a good place to preserve information (there are no threads for example). Sadly many people seem addicted to it.

This too. Where can you find 20-30 YEARS worth of information in Discord?

When googling for something, I invariably ended up in the CCC newsgroup, or on Talkchess, and except for a very minor instances, I found all the information I needed in sometimes VERY old posts.

I agree. I've tried the Leela discord a few times and couldn't stand the format. This site is far more use and there are sufficient kind souls answering questions on the Programming subforum.

[Ras]

Not knowing the network size on compile time is a pessimisation.

Is it? How much is the performance drop? How many Elo are we talking about?