Mr. Houdart's ego should be satisfied with seeing wikipedia credit him for Houdini which must come in handy at family parties and job interviews. Indeed the distractions spark from him trying to weasel out of answering the obvious direct question with all evidence so nicely presented here. Not once but repeatedly. He is intelligent: only implying and suggesting he wrote all of it and avoiding a direct statement except on his webpage. That puts him almost on par with some people who have entered such programs in OTB tournaments. We'll see more of these "Houdarts" come and go. It is sad because the exact same contribution could also be received in a extremely positive way, if not for the dishonesty that comes bundled with it.Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:What qualifications or merit do you think he needs? He wrote his own program. He can see the Houdini output. That makes him overqualified, if anything.Laskos wrote: I don't think you have both qualifications and merit to attack in this manner Robert.
I find it hard to appreciate the "skills" of Mr. Houdart when he himself makes every possible effort to pussyfoot away from the question how much of the performance is his own doing.By the way, Rybka scales worse than both, after 6 years of another "majestic" efforts. I think some people have to appreciate the skills of R. Houdart.
If Mr. Houdart had posted that he implemented an efficient parallelization onto Robbolito, there would be no controversy. But that's not what he is doing. On the contrary, these discussions turn into flamewars because he keeps implying Houdini isn't an Ippolit derivative, despite clear evidence to the contrary. So who's the troll exactly?
In the meantime it is telling that apparently there is still so much elo improvement to be squeezed out of current designs, and that the old-timers are as bad (or worse) at finding it as newcomers. In that way these clones keep me motivated to keep going on for at least another year or two.
I have to say that I have a lot more respect for the anonymous authors of the ippolit series. Unlike the other cloners they demonstrate that they know what they're doing in every detail of their engine. Their code looks like a decompiled pile of rubbish, but there are so many differences with Rybka that I can be made to believe that it is a decompilation of their own code, just distributed like that for the purpose of obfuscation. (Bring me back to reality if you wish).
And of course a big hurray for Ben-Hur Carlos for putting up with all of this deviation in his nice SMP thread while making his engine the way we old people do: 100% from the ground up without secretly copying other's people's work. Our game in Leiden last year was very enjoyable and his progress is steady, fast and intimidating... :)
