GPL discussion, sense and nonsense

[Roger Brown]

Dr. Robert Hyatt gave us rotated bitboards, good for about 100-200 elo on modern hardware.

Fabien <insert French last name that escapes my mind right now here> gave us Fruit, without which almost every program out there would be 200 elo weaker plus there would be no Rybka.

Tord Romstad contributed tons of stuff to computer chess.

Daniel Dshawl (is that how you spell it?) gave us bitbases (IIRC his were the first), good for about 20-40 elo.

The Ippo guys gave Ippolit. 'nuff said.

Miguel Ballicora gave us Gaviota Tablebases, with support for on-the-fly bitbase construction, good for about 10-30 elo on a hard disk and 50ish elo on a SSD.

BTW, are you sure Fabien didn't invent LMR? Or am I just misinformed?

Peter

Hello Peter,

The statement I put in bold had me in stitches. I am in pain still.



Later.

[Harvey Williamson]

BTW, are you sure Fabien didn't invent LMR? Or am I just misinformed?
Peter

AFAIK it was Stefan Meyer Kahlen who was pioneering LMR.

How would you know since he certainly did not discuss it publicly...

How do you know he did not discuss it with others at maybe an ICGA event?

[Sentinel]

How do you know he did not discuss it with others at maybe an ICGA event?

This is just ridiculous.
He might have also discussed it with his wife, or brother or whoever, but that is completely irrelevant.
I would even go as far to claim that if Bob doesn't know for a certain "contribution", then real contribution does not even exist.
What does a chess community has out of private discussion of couple of ICGA participants (if that really happened and is not just another Harvey's manipulation) which nobody can actually confirm???
Nothing at all, nada, zero, zip, zilch is the answer.

[hyatt]

BTW, are you sure Fabien didn't invent LMR? Or am I just misinformed?
Peter

AFAIK it was Stefan Meyer Kahlen who was pioneering LMR.

How would you know since he certainly did not discuss it publicly...

How do you know he did not discuss it with others at maybe an ICGA event?

Quite simply, in that I know a number of competitors at the time that went to those events. Bruce Moreland was one, and we had talked about a "reduction scheme" during the 1996-1997 (both) ICCA WMCCC events. Bruce talked quite a bit with SMK and he didn't reveal a thing about "reductions" to Bruce, as one example. And in the above window, both Bruce and I were experimenting with this idea as previously mentioned, we just never reached a "happy point".

[hyatt]

How do you know he did not discuss it with others at maybe an ICGA event?

This is just ridiculous.
He might have also discussed it with his wife, or brother or whoever, but that is completely irrelevant.
I would even go as far to claim that if Bob doesn't know for a certain "contribution", then real contribution does not even exist.
What does a chess community has out of private discussion of couple of ICGA participants (if that really happened and is not just another Harvey's manipulation) which nobody can actually confirm???
Nothing at all, nada, zero, zip, zilch is the answer.

In the "good old days" we always had a panel discussion at each ACM computer chess tournament, and at some (at least in North America) ICCA events as well. Those were specifically to discuss ideas and such. We often had paper sessions where various more in-depth presentations were made. And the ICCA Journal was _formed_ to provide a written forum for dissemination of computer chess papers. Add 'em all up (ICCA/ICGA papers) and then count the commercial authors. Donninger is the only commercial author that comes to mind. In the late 80's and thru the 90's we had r.g.c.c. Go look at old posts there and see what was discussing actual algorithms and ideas, and who just discussed general topics with no specific ideas of any kind revealed. For all I know, computer chess might have reached the same point we are at today, with nothing but commercial authors. But the key is "for all I know" because they were certainly not heavy contributors to the body of knowledge related to computer chess.

I strongly suspect computer chess would not exist as we know it if not for the early pioneers that did share ideas freely.

[Rebel]

Null-move is about +80 in Crafty. Measured carefully on the cluster. LMR is right at +100 today. By itself with no null-move. Again measured carefully on our cluster. One year ago it was +80, but some recent changes boosted this a bit. But even more importantly, if you already have null-move, LMR is only about +50 more. It is nowhere near +200 or beyond...

You speak of Crafty while I had Rybka, Stockfish and Ippo.* in mind. Apparently they seem to profit a lot more.

How do you figure that? Don Beal wrote the first paper on null-move. Fruit was the first known instance of LMR (known as history pruning). So I am not exactly sure how you say they contributed the most.

There is no LMR in Fruit only "history reductions" based on counters. This idea originally came from Rudolf Huber (SOS) and was successfully implemented by SMK in Shredder. But the idea became known and it got the attention of everybody because of the Fruit sources.

I think that Shredder was the first program to use LMR. It's why Shredder ruled the world for a couple of years. Then (again) the idea of LMR became known (Stephen likes to talk apparently) and Tord eventually gave it the public attention.

References below. Talking commercial programmers

Ed

By Anthony C Date 2008-02-04 14:47 The true inventor of LMR was Stefan Meyer-Kahlen, of course, which is why S7-S9 completely dominated the computer chess world. But Fabien gets credit because he published his work. Stefan didn't, and random message board discussions certainly do not count.

...

cheers,

anthony

and:

By Vasik Rajlich Date 2008-02-08 09:35 Actually, I talked to Stefan about it and yes, he was using LMR in almost exactly the modern way already with Shredder 7. This means re-searches, exceptions for late-move captures and other special moves, etc.

In my view, Tord clearly deserves the main credit for LMR. Fabien probably deserves the #2 spot, since Fruit is what really showed beyond any doubt that this works.

Vas

[Rebel]

When did Frans Morsch supposedly give us recursive null-move? It was certainly in Cray Blitz in 1989 as the version on Carey's "computer chess history" web site will show. The first reference I am aware of is "Selective search without tears" by Don Beal which laid this out nicely.

This gets interesting. You never claimed this until now. You only have said (and multiple times BTW) you and Bruce have tossed with the idea of "null-move" but eventually could not find an improvement and dropped the idea. That is no surprise because the strength of null-move comes from its recursive use. And that was new. The inventor: Frans Morsch. Frans talked to Donninger who wrote an article in the ICCA journal (1994/95). Then in 1996 the topic exploded in RGCC, recursive-null-move was heavily discussed and finally implemented in every chess program. Talking commercials.

I assume you made a typo claiming recursive-null-move as your own, you probably meant null-move.

Ed

[Rebel]

Quite simply, in that I know a number of competitors at the time that went to those events. Bruce Moreland was one, and we had talked about a "reduction scheme" during the 1996-1997 (both) ICCA WMCCC events. Bruce talked quite a bit with SMK and he didn't reveal a thing about "reductions" to Bruce, as one example. And in the above window, both Bruce and I were experimenting with this idea as previously mentioned, we just never reached a "happy point".

Your bias is unbelievable

Have you (yourself) ever spoken with a commercial? I am asking because I never met you on any tournament. You just were never present. I am speaking of 1986 (Munich) and on. Programmers talk on tournaments, the commercial ones included. From several commercial programmers I got: Alpha/Beta, killer heuristic, iterative search, aspiration search, Q-search. I returned as well. They are not much different than you, if you have a passion it's hard to keep your mouth shut especially when you are on an event with your kindred spirits. Just enter a topic and words starts to roll. You should have tried but were not there, so how can you judge so mean?

Ed

[Chris Whittington]

Quite simply, in that I know a number of competitors at the time that went to those events. Bruce Moreland was one, and we had talked about a "reduction scheme" during the 1996-1997 (both) ICCA WMCCC events. Bruce talked quite a bit with SMK and he didn't reveal a thing about "reductions" to Bruce, as one example. And in the above window, both Bruce and I were experimenting with this idea as previously mentioned, we just never reached a "happy point".

Your bias is unbelievable

Have you (yourself) ever spoken with a commercial? I am asking because I never met you on any tournament. You just were never present. I am speaking of 1986 (Munich) and on. Programmers talk on tournaments, the commercial ones included. From several commercial programmers I got: Alpha/Beta, killer heuristic, iterative search, aspiration search, Q-search. I returned as well. They are not much different than you, if you have a passion it's hard to keep your mouth shut especially when you are on an event with your kindred spirits. Just enter a topic and words starts to roll. You should have tried but were not there, so how can you judge so mean?

Ed

An academic is just a commercial unable to find a way to get the masses to pay him, settled for persuading the university bean counters to pay him. The former requires at a bare minimum the ability to fool enough people for enough of the time, the latter the ability to fool one person once and get tenure.

[thorstenczub]

I am speaking of 1986 (Munich) and on.

1986 was cologne. i think bob was there.

ed and me were there too.

1993 was munich.