Re: MiniGo open sourced

Gian-Carlo Pascutto <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.games.devel.go
Message-ID <[email protected]>
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
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