Gabor Szots wrote: ↑Fri Dec 18, 2020 10:55 am
BTW, I have still not found out under which name you had posted before you found this Madeleine Birchfield thing.
I find your insistence that I am not Madeleine Birchfield quite insulting to be honest. I've been a lurker here for most of my time here; I never had an account here until this September. I used to post much more frequently in other places such as the Leela, Stockfish, and TCEC discords, as well as in other non-computer chess related forums such as boards.ie, republican.ie, alternatehistory.com, and laatste.info (the World Draughts Forum) under my name, or the Irish Gaelic version of my name, all before coming to Talkchess. You could go to those sites and find my posts there. I'm mostly on Talkchess because this is where most of the discussion about NNUE is taking place; previously it was in the Stockfish discord and in the TCEC discord.
Before NNUE came on the scene, I did not care about most computer chess engines, as I was only interested in strong engines that used neural networks (i.e. Leela and Allie). At the time, I could talk about in the Leela and Allie discords, rather than here. I only found Talkchess in the first place because I was doing research on Allie and found a few posts here by gonzochess mentioning his engine and the fact that he hopes to ultimately implement minimax search in Allie. However, most people here at the time were absolutely uninterested in talking about neural networks and applying them to their engine, so I had no interest in Talkchess for a very long time other than periodically checking for updates to Allie. Because of that, I was content to simply lurk in the background, spending most of my time talking about Leela and TCEC on the Leela discord, watching kingscrusher and Matthew Sadler's Youtube videos and commenting on them, and lurking in the fishcooking and lczero google groups. And if the shogi engine developers never ported a neural network to Stockfish, then it perhaps would have stayed that way.
However, the Stockfish community started experimenting with NNUE over the summer, and because of that I became extremely interested in Stockfish and the work that they have been doing, and I joined the Stockfish discord as a result. There were a lot of people posting on Talkchess about NNUE, such as Henk Drost, Dietrich Kappe, Norman Schmidt, Joerg Oster and so on, but the same people were on the Stockfish discord, and they were closer to the action talking with actual Stockfish developers such as Joost van der Vondele and Gary Linscott, so much of my attention drifted over to the Stockfish discord, fishcooking, and the Stockfish github. It was there in the Stockfish discord where I first found Vivien Clauzon, Volodymyr Shcherbyna, and Connor McMonigle, and became interested in their chess engines Minic, Igel, and Seer as they were early adopters of NNUE, and from there it brought me into discussions with the other engine developers in the TCEC discord, such as Terje Kirstihagen, the Weiss author who was trying to implement NNUE without success, and Andrew Grant, the Ethereal author who was extremely upset about NNUE at the time. All this time, I was keeping an eye on the discussions on Talkchess but I continued to lurk in the background.
It wasn't until TCEC announced new NNUE guidelines and Andrew Grant started a few drama-filled threads on Talkchess that I felt the need to say something on Talkchess itself regarding the TCEC NNUE guidelines. Hence why my first post was about the TCEC NNUE guidelines and how at the time I saw a double standard between the treatment of Allie/Leela and the treatment of engines using NNUE. This drama not only occurred in Talkchess, but also the Leela, Stockfish, and TCEC discords which I was a part of. Meanwhile, at the time I was shifting my focus away from Stockfish and Leela towards the other engine developers, seeing which of them would adopt NNUE, and as a result, after creating an account here, my activity on the Leela and Stockfish discords slowly declined, while my activity here increased. It was a huge culture shock to discover that even with the hype around NNUE, many people on Talkchess were not interested in the newest algorithms in computer chess, instead talking about hardware, chess analysis, handicap games, and old chess engines from the 1980s.
Many of my views about computer chess that you see here posted on TCEC were largely developed outside of Talkchess on the Stockfish, Leela, and TCEC discords, fishcooking, and the lczero google groups. For example, the fact that Houdini was a Stockfish clone for example I first found out about it through a discussion on fishcooking, and which I later confirmed on the TCEC discord why Houdini was no longer participating in TCEC Season 17.
http://ccrl.chessdom.com/ccrl/4040/
