Marco steps down as Stockfish maintainer

[Henk]

"I think that marco has the right to stop and does not have to give reasons"

My reply was about that I agree with above sentence.


In Holland we have or had a Domino Day each year. Some serious project leaders and many students and volunteers trying to create a chain of few million Domino stones. Trying to break the world record. [Workers are first tested if they are capable enough to put domino stones on the floor.]

Computer Chess is the same madness.

[Vinvin]

A new hope for Robert Houdart and the Komodo team !

[Uri Blass]

A new hope for Robert Houdart and the Komodo team !

I think that it is a new hope for stockfish because there are going to be better maintainers than marco.

I also do not think that possible opponents need stockfish to stop.
It is the opposite and as stockfish become stronger and simpler it can be easier to solve the mystery of why it is so strong in order to get something better.

[Modern Times]

A new hope for Robert Houdart and the Komodo team !

Those were my thoughts as well.

[Sedat Canbaz]

Just my 2 cents over this issue,

Really very sad news...

Once more I'd like to say many thanks to Stockfish team and to congratulate especially Mr. Marco Costalba!
Marco's work was just amazing...there were almost daily free updates, not many like him!

There is no doubt that,
Without Marco Costalba's ideas, efforts... Stockfish would not nearly be as strong as it is nowadays!

And from my experience I can say,
I did not notice so far, where X engine to be the World's strongest one and and in the same time to be released as free!
That means a lot for me!!!

But however,
I can understand and I give right to Marco's decision,
because in our life sometimes there are more important things than chess!

Dear Marco,
Be sure, you will be missed...!!


Best Wishes,
Sedat

[chesstangous]

that a huge project like Stockfish has to be supported with one leader, a team that work and money supported by a group or company.... javascript:emoticon(':!:')javascript:emoticon(':shock:')

[shrapnel]

Good riddance ! I'm glad to see the back of him ! He's the one who removed the Aggression/Cowardice parameters and made Stockfish a toothless old lion !
Hope some wise person reverts those changes !

[shrapnel]

A new hope for Robert Houdart and the Komodo team !

Fully agree ! Free stuff is valueless.
Besides, now there will be more motivation for talented young programmers to enter this field.
Only fools work for free !

[syzygy]

1)What do you mean by
"remove future flexibility"?

If you do not care to understand the patch, then I do not know why you are asking questions.

But to give a short answer: decreasing the size of hash entries from the conventional 16 bytes to 10 bytes very obviously limits what one can do with the hashtable in the future.

An example you should be interested in: only using 8 bits of the hash entry to store depth makes it impossible to store depths > 128 ply (ONE_PLY being 2).

"it was being pushed in ugly ways."
Again I do not understand this comment and do not understand what is wrong.

Then you may have not noticed how this patch was being pushed, by continuously rerunning tests, refusing to communicate on the fishcooking forum and finally calling for people to turn against Marco.

I may be wrong in this, but I think Marco's main gripe is that he does not want to be forced to accept major changes that he, as one of the few people that have a complete overview of the SF code, does not like. It does not then help that other people, most of whom do not have this complete overview, more or less turn against him.

[tpetzke]

A new hope for Robert Houdart and the Komodo team !

But maybe they first drop a lot of places in the ratings lists because the top spots there will now be taken by "official" stockfish variations.