Stockfish: Our lawsuit against ChessBase

[smatovic]

Alright, there was a prev thread about Vas and the ICGA, one point was, there was no team red, may I ask, does your team blue has an team red for your 'investigation'.

The past (even going back to the 80's) has shown that clones / derivatives are easily detected and that programmers are in consensus, like now with Houdini and Fire. And unlike your statement about the Rybka/Fruit case there was a massive red-team, see the list with quotes of 16 programmers, no consensus.

http://rebel13.nl/home/icga.html

You got me wrong. The ICGA panel itself had no team red.

--
Srdja

[AdminX]

Why is computer chess so full of nasty, spiteful people?

If I may be permitted a generalisation, there seem to be a lot of spergs in this field.

Agreed!

[Rebel]

Why is computer chess so full of nasty, spiteful people?

If I may be permitted a generalisation, there seem to be a lot of spergs in this field.

Sperg, a derogatory slang term for someone with Asperger syndrome, autism spectrum disorder or someone showing traits that are commonly associated with it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperg

Watch your tone you young man

[towforce]

Why is computer chess so full of nasty, spiteful people?

If I may be permitted a generalisation, there seem to be a lot of spergs in this field.

Sperg, a derogatory slang term for someone with Asperger syndrome, autism spectrum disorder or someone showing traits that are commonly associated with it. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperg

Watch your tone you young man

I agree it's not nice - but young people seem to have started using the term widely, without, I'm guessing, fully understanding the etymology. The meaning I'm hearing from the way it's used is, roughly, "opposite of a muscular alpha male". Of course I'm not an official arbiter of the English language!

[Luecx]

It feels like many people here dont understand the difference between whats legal and what is allowed. The legal part is decided by official courts where as what is allowed is decided by the chess community. Especially the unique engine authors, tcec etc.

According to common chess community standards, it is not allowed to:

- steal code
- not correctly credit other people if parts of it are used
- using other peoples data when training NN's
- ...

I do not care if FF is actually legal or not, all i know is what they did is not allowed by common chess community standards and they need to face the consquences for that.

- FF2 runs on a slightly modified version of SF. This can be distributed in binary form according to the GPLv3 as long as you provide the source. See github,
- Stockfish is credited prominently in the marketing copy of FF2. (I suspect they did that because Stockfish is a selling point, but that’s just a guess.) It’s on the box.
- FF2 was trained on data generated using FF1. Not hard to believe. I generated a ton of data using Bad Gyal, Toga, Ice, etc., though not nearly as much as Albert.

So there you go. Common chess community standards(tm) adhered to. You are now free to enjoy FF2 without guilt. You’re welcome.

Your post might make people think that FF1 was original in the first place.
Changing 3 lines in stockfish does not make it a new engine.
And the list i named of people in this community judging what is allowed or not ("Especially the unique engine authors, tcec etc.") did not name you...

[KLc]

Did anyone notice that there is “Fat Fritz 2 SE” now? https://shop.chessbase.com/en/products/fat_fritz_2. It looks like they currently aren’t allowed to sell “Fat Fritz 2” anymore, so they just rebranded it.

[Modern Times]

Curious, I wonder what the difference is ?

[Jakob Progsch]

I do not care if FF is actually legal or not, all i know is what they did is not allowed by common chess community standards and they need to face the consquences for that.

That's what gets me about all these discussions of legality in public forums. Even if everything was explicitly and unambiguously legal the displayed behavior still deserves "judgement". Every developer should be insulted by this kind of rebranding and representation independent of their involvement. The tunnel vision on legality frightens me since it hints at the seemingly prevalent idea that legal=acceptable and exploitation of anything or anyone is ok as long as no one has thought to formally make it illegal.

[AdminX]

Did anyone notice that there is “Fat Fritz 2 SE” now? https://shop.chessbase.com/en/products/fat_fritz_2. It looks like they currently aren’t allowed to sell “Fat Fritz 2” anymore, so they just rebranded it.

Does the SE stand for Stockfish Edition?

[AlexChess]

Since it's impossible to reach Stockfish 14 (+100 ELO over commercials Dragon 2.0 and Fat Fritz 2.0, +200 ELO over Ethereal 13 NNUE) the only way to survive for Chessbase is to include Powerbooks 2022 & up to 7-man online tablebases on Fritz 18 if they want to sell their 20 years old GUI for 99€, not only the SF modified source code! How is possible that they cannot hire a top level developers team to create their own engine instead of simply rename "Fritz" the work of others???

My Superblitz between all the best engines:
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-a ... e-fritz-17

Regards, AlexChess

You assume customers care only about elo.
It is possible to sell a new engine because it has some other relative advantages.

For example faster in finding mates relative to stockfish and relative to all other engines based on analysis of many winning positions
or can tell users if there is a forced draw for one side that is something I would like to have in an engine (0.00 evaluation is not equivalent to a forced draw).

Another option is being best in getting points against weak engines with some big handicap that is again something that is possible to test and maybe it is possible to have some engine that is 200 elo better than other engines when it start without queen d1(of course no possible points against strong engines but possible points maybe against tscp or weaker engines).

For that there are programs like SparkChess (very nice, full of features including 3D graphics and perfect for 99% of chess players) that are free or cost much less. But a lot of people here, that like me are interested in engines matches, are looking only for the strongest ones and they do not want to pay for engines that are 200 Elo weaker than Stockfish 14, having also at least 20 other strong FREE derivatives and hundreds of original engines from very skilled programmers worldwide.