Reasons of the crisis...

[rhollay]

When I joined CCC (and CTF) I found it quite an interesting forum with many exciting
topics and discussions. Today, like many others, I'm only an occasional visitor here.
I'm not sure if computer chess is in a crisis (globally) or just CCC. Of course,
many of us will not agree with me, but here are my observations about the reasons:
- childish behaviour of some, even respectable, members (quarelling,
banning, sulkiness,...);
- "everybody is a troll except me" behaviour. If only "non-troll experts"
were allowed to write here then CCC would soon become as busy as Exactachess.
- splitting CCC in several subfora;
- releasing Fruit 2.0 open source and all the consequences of this
(programmers losing interest in trying out own original ideas, clone engines, ...);
- Rybka. It leads the rating lists with such superiority that there is no real
competition among top engines, small improvements in strength are no
more enough against Rybka.

Just my 2c ... I know many think there's no crisis at all

[swami]

- splitting CCC in several subfora;
- releasing Fruit 2.0 open source and all the consequences of this
(programmers losing interest in trying out own original ideas, clone engines, ...);
- Rybka. It leads the rating lists with such superiority that there is no real
competition among top engines, small improvements in strength are no
more enough against Rybka.

Just my 2c ... I know many think there's no crisis at all

CCC is not in crisis, But I agree with you on above points.

Your "splitting CCC in several subfora;" statement alone refutes the "CCC
in crisis"

[matejst]

CCC is probably in crisis. In the last few month, members were leaving one after the other. Steve B., Ruxy S. were the last ones. Something is obviously happening.

I am not quite sure what the reasons are; I have a few ideas of mine, but it doesn't have to be right.

Kind regards.

BS

[Uri Blass]

<snipped>

- releasing Fruit 2.0 open source and all the consequences of this
(programmers losing interest in trying out own original ideas, clone engines, ...);
(

I do not think that programmers lost interest in trying out original ideas.

Uri

[Mike S.]

We would need more fresh input, at least in the General Topics forum... maybe some (or many) regulars, including myself, have become somewhat tired when it's about interesting new ideas or -positions to discuss.

Also, I think some activity is moving away from the message boards to blogs. To some extent, blogs may replace message boards. I don't mean entirely, but for some types of contacts and communication. At the same time, blogs seem to be the new homepages.

(I don't know about the programming subforum and how the traffic developes there.)

[rhollay]

I do not think that programmers lost interest in trying out original ideas.
Uri

IRC before Fruit 2.0 was released Movei had been stronger (or at least
similar strength) then any of the open-source engines at that time.
Then Fruit 2.0 came and immediately became the king of all freeware
engines. And it was OS. Since then every programmer could borrow ideas
from Fruit code. You also.
My question: did it stimulate you to work more to find out original ideas
to improve Movei, or was it more simple to borrow some ideas from Fruit
code and improve Movei that way?

[Marc Lacrosse]

CCC is not in crisis (...)

I belong to the group of those who feel less and less happy with the present evolution of CCC.

For what regards myself, the main concern is the lack of substantial content in a growing proportion of posts.

How do you feel Swami when you post no less than 17 near one-liners without any added value in less than three hours like you did today between 7:11 and 11:31 am?

This is no more a forum (with ideas, original data, controversies sometimes) but more and more a kind of instantaneous chat among kids who feel that everyone has to add his own smiley to the chat room.

This is not content. This is noise.

And yes I think that news about pet dogs should not be here. Wasn't CTF created for that?

If I take into account the additional sterilising effect of an overpresent moderation who does not seem able to accept any kind of controversies...

I miss the time where Jeroen, Sandro, Peter (and sometimes myself) could have some arguments on opening preps with long detailed posts supporting our respective opinions.

I miss Cozzie's witty interventions, I miss Diepeveen obsessions. I guess that if someone was to republish some of their older posts today under another name they would be immediately censored by our present moderators. Sometimes it seems that banalities mixed with the adequate number of smileys will be the last kind of content that we will see here ...

I miss the time where some guys were able to silently test some hypothesis and wait till they had thousands of games before publishing a well prepared report on it.
But now it seems that a couple of games are worth a report full of unjustified exclamation marks...

I post much less than a few years ago.
I read less often than a few months ago.

If this trend continues I suppose I will silently withdraw...

Inbetween I play and test and tune more than ever so I suppose it's not really myself losing interest in computer chess.

I find many interesting discussions in the programmiers subforum (most of them I do not really understand), on Rybka's forum and at Volker's Winboard one and I follow them daily.

But IMHO the general and tournament subforum are less and less worth visiting.

Marc

[rdan1987]

Unfortunately. Mr.Lacrosse is right....that is EXACTLY what I thought when i started the thread "what kind of forum is this?"..but I was soon criticized by most of the members..
Some people here are only interested in their NUMBER of posts and not the QUALITY of their posts....don't want to give names...because probably my message will be deleted.

Regards, Dan

[Uri Blass]

I do not think that programmers lost interest in trying out original ideas.
Uri

IRC before Fruit 2.0 was released Movei had been stronger (or at least
similar strength) then any of the open-source engines at that time.
Then Fruit 2.0 came and immediately became the king of all freeware
engines. And it was OS. Since then every programmer could borrow ideas
from Fruit code. You also.
My question: did it stimulate you to work more to find out original ideas
to improve Movei, or was it more simple to borrow some ideas from Fruit
code and improve Movei that way?

Nothing was simple and it seems that movei simply did not improve significantly from that time if you ignore blitz time control and compare only 295 with 403.

It seems clear that I did some steps that were counter productive at long time control and maybe I should look again at my buggy code from version 295 to see if I can take ideas from that code that were productive at long time control(I hope that I did not lose that code because inspite of saving my code often I did not consider old code as important and it is possible that after a crash of my computer I did not care to save that code)

I sent the code often to myself by gmail but unfortunately I started to use gmail only in the beginning of 2005 and I am not sure if the demage for longer time control was not done earlier.

Thinking about differences between 295 and later versions I can say that
version 295 used less reductions than newer versions and searched to smaller depth and maybe it was one of the reasons that 295 was relatively better at long time control because later movei do too much reductions.

There may be other reasons and it is possible that another change is the reason for the failure of later versions at long time control.

Uri

[mclane]

i do not think computerchess is in a crisis.

diepeven, whittington and other "interesting" people who sometimes post something that polarizes would IMO not be deleted here. why should it ?
you all claim: it would maybe be deleted. but i doubt this.

those people are my friends. and if they have to say something with computerchess-content, why should it be deleted.

i don't think computerchess is in a crisis.
it transforms.
in the 90 it was not possible anymore to make money by selling dedicated chess computer. so the most companies went bancrott. today it is not anymore possible to make money by selling computerchess-software. so most producers retire, go bancrott or stop working.

but computerchess is STILL there. its now mainly a hobby thing. and this is nothing we should be disapointed about. it is BACK TO THE ROOTS.
the business-men had never an interest in computerchess, only in exploiting it. therefore computerchess was in those business-years mainly
PROFIT. any stupid things had been done. today computerchess can go back to the roots. its alive as ever.

when thomas nitsche mentioned his ideas about computerchess (Mephisto III and its future) in 1986 in cologne, he was mainly laughed by the "computerchess" people who were to the most business men. they laughed about his ideas because they could not profit from it . so nitsche was replaced by Richard Lang. for a long time H+G and those "business-men" were able to profit from Lang.
then this stopped suddenly and they changed the horses again.

today those guys (business men) are nearly dead. they left the building.
and this makes me happy.
because we can come back to the point where they came in.
and laughed.


IMO the times when those guys poinsened any discussion about ideas is over.
therefore i do not see that computerchess is not alive.

today i am sitting in front of 2 dedicated chess computers i never tested in times they came on the market. the mephisto nigel short (because it was only sold in UK) and the talking chess academy (because it was sold in times we were mainly concentrated in computerchess software).

i am completely happy to sit in front of those old weak computers.
at home i have ARENA working and running like hell. never had a better instrument for testing chess software than this arena GUI.
the Core 2 Duo is perfect for my testing purposes. the cpu's are cool,
the PC is silent. i am happy when i relate this to the times before
(486, hot but cheap AMD cpu's ).


we don't have auto232 autoplayers anymore that sometimes STOP . we don't use GUI's anymore that sometimes STOP. IMO computerchess has made big progress.

why is everybody crying ?