What the computer chess community needs to decide

[bob]

Specifically Houdini is Ivanhoe (which is a parallel Roboolito) that has had the strings changed from Italian to English and then had various bug fixes to make the smp work.

The values may come from 3 but the exe that was disassembled to make Ippolit was 2.3.2 is my belief.

There exists a vesion of Rybka 2.3.2 that did not have its symbols stripped. Would make the disassembly so much easier. It was given to various people one of whom leaked it. It was used as you know to tune Rybka and had it's own interface for that purpose.

The date of the executable is 10/5/2006.

It is programmable. I have learned how to program it.

Chris

Thanks for your reply. Regarding Rybka/Robbo, do you know whether singular extension was in 2.3.2 or just in 3.0? It is in Robbo. Your theory seems plausible if you mean that 2.3.2 code was then modified by ideas and parameter values in R3, as well as some original ideas. At least some eval terms in Robbo were from R3, not 2.3.2. The increased LMR in Robbo was (I believe) different from both Rybkas, and probably accounts for some of the increased Elo over R3.

Regarding Houdini 1.5, do you mean that the large rating jump over Robbo and Ivanhoe was just due to bug fixes? Surely there is some new idea that accounts for some of the Elo points; Robbo/Ivanhoe was not that buggy, I think.

Larry

I tried to use robo* on my cluster as an opponent. It crashed enough that I gave up. It had a ton of crashes. Whether it was just one bug or not is unknown as I am not real big on debugging other people's code, unless it is one of my students.

[paulo]

Exactly. That's why I gave my answer.
What would you answer in your particular case?

I have a number of engines, all built with different purposes. Some to have maximum strength/size ratio, some for experimenting with pruning strategies, or programming techniques, some to do research in variant piece values.

So your engine aims to be top dog? What was the name of your engine again?

I never said I had an engine or ever that did try to create (or adapt) one, did I?
Seems you are running out of arguments.

[paulo]

Today only a complete asshole would start coding a new engine from scratch, i.e., ignoring all the (best) available ideias and resources.

The two are not the same. You can start from scratch using all the available ideas together with yours. And you can start from a complete code and put in your ideas.

Nope. It's exactly the same thing as long as you agree the existing code you are basing is the best. Furthermore I strongly believe any experienced software developer agrees with this.

Here is one that does not. Copying source is not "software development" by the way, it is "software plagiarism". HUGE difference...

I respect your opinion but I don't see it that way and don't consider copying. Furthermore, modern sw development is heavily based on code-reuse, either yours or, in most cases, from other sources.

regards

Code reuse is good - as long as it is allowed based on existing copyright and license situation.

For most SW companies "code reuse" means to reuse existing *own* code mainly.

Sven

Code reuse is good - as long as it is allowed based on existing copyright and license situation.

For most SW companies "code reuse" means to reuse existing *own* code mainly.

Code reuse is not just good is strongly encouraged. Only short-minded SW companies would ignore all the existing **free** libraries and sources available at a mouse click.

Why do you keep talking about "free" or "public domain" libraries and sources? That is not the subject we are talking about here. Fruit can't be copied unless the copier follows the GPL requirements... A commercial program can't be disassembled, converted to C, then modified and used/distributed. So somehow you have veered away from the discussion at hand and jumped into a sub-set of software development without considering the larger picture where code-reuse only applies within a single company or product of theirs, not across companies, and certainly not across all instantiations of a particular software idea.

I'm afraid it is you who is not considering the big picture, instead you are focused only on your chess engine development just looking through your own glasses and somehow obsessed by the law. I ought to say, IMO, this is a strange position coming from a man of science but I accept and try to understand that.

Regards
Paulo

[hgm]

I never said I had an engine or ever that did try to create (or adapt) one, did I?
Seems you are running out of arguments.

Arguments? What arguments? I was just answering your question.

What would you expect me to argue about? It was allready established with absolute certainty about 200 postings ago that only a complete asshole would think all engine authors copy code, rather than writing it from scratch. So what is left to argue?

[Christopher Conkie]

I never said I had an engine or ever that did try to create (or adapt) one, did I?
Seems you are running out of arguments.

Arguments? What arguments? I was just answering your question.

What would you expect me to argue about? It was allready established with absolute certainty about 200 postings ago that only a complete asshole would think all engine authors copy code, rather than writing it from scratch. So what is left to argue?

The best post of the day. I must say I did laugh out loud.

There is no substitute for quality. What a super-dupa post.



Chris

[lkaufman]

Ivanhoe smp was more buggy than a termite hill.

Chris

Were the bugs in Ivanhoe ones that would affect the Elo rating on a single core? I wonder whether bug fixes alone could account for the higher Houdini rating. Also, the rating jump in Houdini 1.5 corresponds in time to the addition of LMR at PV nodes in Ivanhoe. Assuming this was copied into the latest Houdini, this could account for the large speedup and much of the Elo gain. What do you think?

[Milos]

Were the bugs in Ivanhoe ones that would affect the Elo rating on a single core? I wonder whether bug fixes alone could account for the higher Houdini rating. Also, the rating jump in Houdini 1.5 corresponds in time to the addition of LMR at PV nodes in Ivanhoe. Assuming this was copied into the latest Houdini, this could account for the large speedup and much of the Elo gain. What do you think?

LMR at PV nodes is -5 Elo. Is Don really so clueless?
And you believe what Chris writes???

[Christopher Conkie]

Ivanhoe smp was more buggy than a termite hill.

Chris

Were the bugs in Ivanhoe ones that would affect the Elo rating on a single core? I wonder whether bug fixes alone could account for the higher Houdini rating. Also, the rating jump in Houdini 1.5 corresponds in time to the addition of LMR at PV nodes in Ivanhoe. Assuming this was copied into the latest Houdini, this could account for the large speedup and much of the Elo gain. What do you think?

Everything in Ivanhoe was copied into Houdini progressively.

As Ivanhoe got something.....so did Houdini.

Houdini is nothing more that the dull non-swearing face of Ivanhoe,

Think of it as "their marketing".



Chris

[paulo]

I never said I had an engine or ever that did try to create (or adapt) one, did I?
Seems you are running out of arguments.

Arguments? What arguments? I was just answering your question.

What would you expect me to argue about? It was allready established with absolute certainty about 200 postings ago that only a complete asshole would think all engine authors copy code, rather than writing it from scratch. So what is left to argue?

The best post of the day. I must say I did laugh out loud.

There is no substitute for quality. What a super-dupa post.



Chris

Oh so funny, indeed one the best posts ever. LOLLLL

I rest my case so you have more time to play the chess engine authors with your silly engines all written from scratch.
Good luck.

[Don]

Ivanhoe smp was more buggy than a termite hill.

Chris

Were the bugs in Ivanhoe ones that would affect the Elo rating on a single core? I wonder whether bug fixes alone could account for the higher Houdini rating. Also, the rating jump in Houdini 1.5 corresponds in time to the addition of LMR at PV nodes in Ivanhoe. Assuming this was copied into the latest Houdini, this could account for the large speedup and much of the Elo gain. What do you think?

I personally believe it is due to bug fixes, and some work on evaluation, mostly endgame stuff. However it's likely there were a lot of other minor changes.

In any program there are about 100 changes you COULD make that have very little consequence one way or the other, and I'm sure that would have been done too. That would be one way to "customize" the program and make it seem like it was your own.