Reasons of the crisis...

[Graham Banks]

Some people here are only interested in their NUMBER of posts and not the QUALITY of their posts

Regards, Dan

I agree with you entirely. Some members need to be more responsible with their posting. Windows live messenger or Skype can be used for idle chat.

Regards, Graham.

[Graham Banks]

There are now other places where computer chess discussions are more lively and content-rich than the mean ones in our general forum.

Marc

Can you please give links Marc.

Regards, Graham.

[mongrel]

Maybe this will be the last time I say it: I've been away for about seven years. Upon returning, I find the forum lively and fascinating. The computer chess scene has evolved, and the forum has evolved with it.
Since Rybka is dominant now, a lot of effort goes into the question "Who's #2", which is a little less exciting. This (probably) won't last forever.

The programming subforum is the most fascinating. Of course! In the General forum, you have people like myself who visit. I am a consumer. I've spent a lot of money on software, in the past. And I'm a fan of the free programs too. With regard to the absence of some (already) famous programmers in *this* forum, I say, they're missing a chance to remain present, in my mind. Part of this is a changing of the guard, too, and the (new) famous programmers face the challenge of filling the shoes of the older ones, by writing strong chess programs, but also, by working to popularize them in the minds of the masses, a different task, and one that I might find irksome, myself, in comparison to chess-programming.
(O.K., I'll mention one- an obvious example: Dr. Hyatt. Which of the youngsters could replace him? Is anyone trying?)

Now I'm writing to those who would be "popularizers":
The computer vs. human question is basically answered now. But there are other problems that are, *at this time*, both insoluble, and also tantalizingly close to being "ready" to argue about, much as the "computer versus best human of all time" question was, some ten or more years ago.
I can think of some:
1. computer opinions of opening theory, arrived at by massive search. Some day, (now?) the width of playable openings will begin to decrease, as many lines are proven? to be bad, to some extent. In the course of my lifetime, this width increased, e.g., Ruy Lopez Berlin in Kasparov-Kramnik, etc. But that trend should change eventually, one could argue, and maybe the time is now.
2. Massive computer analysis of the famous human players of the past, with the goal of assigning them ratings (not relative to their peers, but relative to some standard imposed by the program). Is anyone working on this? Many people still love the memory, or the legacy, of their favorite players. If you gave, say, Alekhine, 2600 with voluminous proof of tactical mistakes worse than those of, say, Capablanca 2700, you'd have some interesting material. You could write an epoch-making book in chess history: one much like others that have been written on this subject, but with "proof" (conditional upon the program having a given rating- so the answers could never be final.) I repeat: that is exactly the ideal type of question for stimulating discussion among the masses, and the experts. (And that is what this thread is about.)
3. Someone needs to start arguing, with regard to play against humans, that the exact peak strength is now irrelevant. A new goal is "ready" to be discussed, as I described above: a program that is *positionally* better than any human. You could attempt to prove this with analyses of the great players and games of the past. And I assure you that you could sell, or excuse me, popularize, some programs, or books, if you can *merely argue well* that they know more than certain famous players, including other programs. Back when Fritz was on top, I detested it, and sought, and bought, weaker programs that in my opinion played better.

If the new programmers don't work to popularize their creations, they'll have strong programs in which noone is interested. That is much sadder than mere alleged dullness in a forum.

If you're a little burned-out, just quit for a while. I've been studying Chinese, and have a collection of Chinese study forums where I can go and complain, or contribute!

(I don't have time to proofread this post. Bye.)

[matejst]

I thought about other topics: p.e., how much will the recent revelations about Rybka's structure affect the development of new engines: will there be another big jump; how to make a good learning function, or to implement more knowledge (mostly plans in the middlegame), and make the behaviour of the engines closer to the way of thinking of human players... we are not yet certain what is a clone and what is not a clone...

We can disagree, of course, have different opinions, but we can do it in a civilized way. There is no reason to avoid such topics.

Kind regards.

BS

[rhollay]

OK guys, but IMO deleting the posts was not necessary. I'm not one of those
becoming easily offended. But others can get hurt if you delete their
valuable opinions, witty remarks...

[sandro Necchi]

Hi Marc,

I agree with you, but I think the crisis is in reality a sort of evolution that occured:

1. Some people are only interested in which one is the best engine and if the strongest one is clearly the best there is no discussion and no interest to discuss anything.
2. Not having at least two engines with similar strenght is somehow damaging insterest so we need to hope that this will be changed soon.
3. Many people are not interested in stronger engines because they are not strong players and are not interested to improve their chess skillness. They feel what they have is more than enough. I personally do not agree with them as I think there is still room for improvements and a "perfect chess player" would be fashinating to see.
4. The World Champion loosing to a commercial program was also a disaster for computer chess and chess interests.
5. For people like me it is not interesting to post here because most of the time we would be attacked with superficial analysis and is not interesting to to try to explain things to people which are not willing to lesson as they feel they already know everything and that they think you are making marketing or things like that. I really have no time for those people and a lot less patient than I had before...
Of course anybody can say anything they want, but too often some people thought that using big words would have give them "the truth". This behavior and the non protection of the moderators of these people (I am referring to programmers mainly and people who have many years experience in this field) have moved away those people from this field as by writing thigs one could be easily insulted or asked to defend himsel...for what?
I still like to discuss about chess and computer chess as well as new ideas and so on, but with friends...advantages/disadvantages and reason...or possibly experience behind new ideas or old one reconsidered in a different way.
Luckily everybody can still learn something everyday providing that is willing to lesson, keep the mind open and reconsider everything. This is something fashinating with chess and computer chess!

[Dann Corbit]

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

If you need some of your old source, I have the code for every version you sent me (that started with version 251).

[mongrel]

Hi Robert Hollay. Of course, I was talking about myself, and offering my story to you!

With regard to your original post, I can see the other side too: The "solution" to the computer versus human question has left us without a lot of the drama and human interest. There is a danger that what was once a dramatic tale of the striving of a programmer and his program, could turn into a triviality, like voices coming out of a telephone, or moving pictures. This could happen overnight.
That's why the forum and the programmers need to evolve with the new reality, as my posts discussed.
I think we're all in basic agreement.

[Uri Blass]

Thanks

I found versions 294 and 296 but it seems that I did not save the code with version 295

Uri

[Dann Corbit]

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.

I agree that behavior has shooed some away. That does not mean that computer chess is on the decline, but only that the CCC general topics forum is getting whalloped.

- splitting CCC in several subfora;

I think this move has sterilized the general forum somewhat, because the programmers moved out for the most part.

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

The opposite is true. The super-strong engines glaurung and fruit have raised the bar and the strength of engines is climbing faster than ever before. Also, if you look at the graph of new engines:
http://rwbc-chess.de/Additional/chronology.htm
You will see that there is still plenty of interest and there are now nearly 400 Winboard and/or UCI chess 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.

I don't think that Rybka has done anything negative at all. Shredder totally dominated for a long time. What did that hurt? Zappa is nearly as strong as Rybka. I also believe that eventually Rybka will be dethroned (just like all the others). Being the strongest chess engine in the world is like being leader of a country. It's not going to last forever.

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