On 30-01-18 20:59, Álvaro Begué wrote: > Chrilly Donninger's quote was probably mostly true in the 90s, but > it's now obsolete. That intellectual protectionism was motivated by > the potential economic profit of having a strong engine. It probably > slowed down computer chess for decades, until the advent of strong > open-source programs. Paradoxically, when the economic incentive to > create strong engines was removed, we saw an explosion in strength.
There still seems to be an economic incentive to improve [1] strong engines and try to sell them. It should be noted that until Stockfish came along, open source computer chess engines were a graveyard where every strong enough engine just got cloned or plagiarized and real enduring cooperation was essentially nonexistent. You just had 10 non-cooperating forks (some closed source, and some allegedly commercial ones) that added <-20 ... >+100 Elo. There had been open source engines as early as GNUChess (or probably earlier...), and very strong ones like Fruit. I don't know for sure what allowed Stockfish to (mostly) escape the same fate. Right now I would say fishtest is a huge factor, but it might've been doing fine before that. [1] I originally wrote "create" here but that might not be correct. -- GCP _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list Computer-go@computer-go.org http://computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
