Question for Norman Schmidt ... Fizbo is the topic!

[carldaman]

Hi Frank,

Is Ethereal now excluded from your tourneys? I vaguely recall some sort of dispute a while back...

Cheers

[Frank Quisinsky]

I wrote him a not very friendly e-mail about 18 months ago. His reply was understandable and probably correct. It's stupid that I can't use Ethereal but I brought that on myself. So I have no doubts about his good reputation and wish him good luck for Ethereal and Torch.

[Frank Quisinsky]

Forgotten ...
My tournaments are just for fun, nothing that's really important today.
But maybe the information will help programmers to reduce the "long draw games" a bit.

[abgursu]

...
A Fizbo NNUE implementation using nnue-probe wouldn't damage Fizbo in any way...it would just create a different & much stronger flavor.
...

Because you'd be removing one of the most interesting and original aspects of Fizbo both from a playing style perspective and an engineering perspective. You'd be lopping off its pioneering evaluation function and replacing it with Stockfish ~12's evaluation function. Whether the code is copied from Stockfish or copied from the reimplementation of the Stockfish code in CFish could not possibly be less relevant. Fizbo was renowned for its unique playing style and if you're going to argue that its evaluation function had no bearing on its playing style, you're delusional.

Separately, I'd be surprised if it proved stronger than Seer at this point, but I'm also not really inclined to care.

Edit: To clarify, the existence of a Fizbo+SF-NNUE wouldn't be a shame. The shame would be in anyone (such as Frank) actually using it.

The vice versa could have been interesting, Stockfish's strong search and Fizbo's stylish evaluation. Fizbo's main weakness was always in the search, it required a long time or high hardware to play without falling into long tactics. I think it would've left quite a mark, but I guess no one will take the time and work onto something like that.