Mussaurus 0.1-prealpha - a poor man's Vice

[Richard Allbert]

Richard, did you just reveal yourself as the (unknown) author of Vice, or am I just confused?

probably.

[Richard Allbert]

** snipped **

Don't give up with it. There's no need to pressure yourself, no one will laugh, point the finger or anything. In fact, this community is the opposite - it's very helpful, testers and programmers alike.

However, do make sure you take advice on board - and that usually starts with making your program bug free - starting with perft passing many positions and moving on from there. Next, take the advice people on here offer, it's invaluable, and don't take criticism personally.

I've written lots and lots of apps (with bad code) over the years, and the chess programs remain the highlight. I still have one playing on FICS.

[shinkarom]

If a man hasn't earned anything (like, a nice round zero) in 28-and-a-half years, and the cost of living steadily rises, and the quantity of software that works on 32 bit dwindles with every week, and health conditions preclude him from doing much, then by Maslow's hierarchy of needs the enjoyment of anything else is bound to drop.
About laughing and pointing fingers: check out how one community discouraged me from creating conlangs (which I enjoyed until I understood that nobody needs a n00b to waste their time and attention). http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37442 http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=41698 http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37304 After that I realized the need for full disclosure, so that people don't make too good impressions.
Over there, the advice people offered amounted to "You suck, so shut up, know your place and contact us only when you're good enough", while I expected some nudges to the right direction, taking my n00b status into account. And yes, the lack of social life made it difficult to communicate.
But to know my plce, I should first know what this place is. That's why the need for constant feedback: to give me the relative standing on the "leaderboard", which is needed to not go above my league. You see why it's hard to not take criticism personally: it may offer information on my personal position.
Mussaurus was an endeavor to leave some legacy, but you can't be accepted as equal without becoming an equal first, can you?

[Ovyron]

Well, this community is a mixed bag, there will be people that will give useful feedback and encourage you to continue, others will ignore the project (because they're only interested in chess engines that are at the top, or ones with interesting features like style tweaking), others can attack you or imply that, indeed, it'd be better for everyone if you dedicated your time to something else.

The question you have to ask is if you'd be happy if at the end of the show there's only a single person clapping, and if it's worthwhile to do it just for them. If it is, more will come (mainly, people that like seeing progress, wanting to see how Mussaurus rises to the top, and it's not necessarily about elo.)

Note you will get most feedback from engine chess enthusiasts that aren't programmers and wouldn't know how to make an engine themselves, because most chess engine testers dedicate to testing what exists, not to create more. Coming from that angle you have to realize that, if your engine is already able to play chess, then you're miles ahead of most people around here, including "programmers" that just change a few lines of code from open source software Stockfish, and make their "releases" just like others that have built everything from scratch.

It's easy to stand on the shoulders of giants, but not to maintain an engine made from the bottom up, no matter its status.

Have you checked what is the lowest Stockfish depth that Mussaurus can beat? (Stockfish being limited in Depth while Muss plays normally) Perhaps that would be a good starting point to get more feedback, as eventually Mussaurus would be able to overcome it if you keep working on it, and it would allow you to show some of Muss's games so we see how it plays. This isn't just about the engine's code.

[shinkarom]

I know you do like style tweaking. I like engines with style too. Losing to Rodent on depth 1 doesn't hinder my appreciation of it. And Zappa Mexico Dissident Aggressor is a wild beast from nightmares. Reminds me of AI War Fleet Command.
Well, Mussaurus is already gone, and there is still much to learn. For example, Brutus dedicates one unit just for sliding move generation.
My "racehorse" is performance. It is the main thing that I like to optimize. Stockfish (or even Amoeba, which is written in D) is able to look 13 plys ahead in the time my dinosaur can see only 7. Of course, they are multi-threaded, which I now consider obligatory, because it promises more speed.
One reason I got frustrated with my engine is the only thing I used it for was 1+0 with Nero. That gets boring very fast. Maybe next time there will be more diverse rogues gallery.
If only tmokonen's post about enjoying playing with my engine came sooner, then I wouldn't write off my work as fruitless.
By the way, how's my English (the only thing I got complimented upon), and what still needs work?

[Ovyron]

If only tmokonen's post about enjoying playing with my engine came sooner, then I wouldn't write off my work as fruitless.

Just because something you do doesn't produce fast results doesn't mean it'll never will. It's like a seed, you plant it and let it do its job, you don't destroy it because nothing came out of the ground as fast as you hoped. Perhaps if you had kept working on it, one year from now you'd have gotten 100 users like tmokonen that enjoyed using your engine and gave you the feedback you wanted, but I guess we'll never know now, will we?

By the way, how's my English (the only thing I got complimented upon), and what still needs work?

As someone that spent several years on the other side of the fence worrying about it, the best advice I can give you is to never ask people how's your english. When I was reading your messages it looked fine to me because I was understanding what I was reading, after your question I went back and it suddenly looked grammatically weird as if by magic. You'll improve it naturally with experience, as misunderstandings arise, or people ask for clarification. Otherwise, conscious effort to check what you should be typing or not gets in the way of natural flow. Just go to old messages you have written and if you can still tell what you were talking about, they're fine.

[shinkarom]

But they, like tmokonen, would tell me it only after frustrated deletion of the project.
The thing is, without energy giving medicine (I can relax my English a little now that nobody expects much) any long term project will be abandoned at some point. Right now the stamina level is so low reading is the only viable activity. Debugging and runing test games to see if something has broken not so much. And due to aforementioned lack of any lifetime merit the gratification better be instant or it's unlikely ever to happen. (The thread has long ago stopped being about chess programming and became an unpaid psychoterapy session). I'd deleted CheeseForth, the Forth implementation I was creating because the thought of the need for constant maintenance did hurt.
I see no methods of earning money that would be possible with no skills and with sending money to Ukraine. Well, there's my English-Russian translation gig on Fiverr, but it's untested and I won't know the quality of my work until somebody buys it, and given Fiverr is not lacking for professional translators the chances are similar to my chances of competing in TCEC. { I know,I know. But this is not for self-promotion. } This is to explain why I can't wait for the seed to grow.

[Ovyron]

I'm a nobody that can't really speak as if representing the whole community of computer chess, but it is my belief that all the chess programmers that I've met or known about, did it because they enjoyed it. The instant gratification is to see the program grow, to see that ideas that they had and were implemented into the program made it play better chess, or that they didn't, so they discovered yet another thing that wouldn't work, in their search for something that did.

We have been fortunate enough that those people didn't keep their job to themselves, and that they shared it with us, because no matter how small a contribution is, it holds some value. Even this thread here, could possibly inspire other programmers that get very frustrated because of lack of feedback, that have the urge to delete everything they have done and abandon all hope, to wait for a bit, in case someone appears that says they enjoyed using the program, before it's too late.

I have seen passion in chess programmers, specially those that create open source engines and expect nothing in return. If you don't have it, then quitting it was a smart choice, because it was just a distraction from looking for your passion. Something you can do that you'll enjoy even if you get no feedback, even if nobody knows about what you're doing. Only then will you feel true gratification, and the satisfaction you got when you read someone enjoyed using Mussaurus will be peanuts by comparison.

[shinkarom]

The problem wasn't so much with the lack of feedback as with the code progressively getting sloppier and sloppier, spaghettier and spaghettier. I could already forecast that after some time the program would be a horrible mess with no hope of untangling the code. Its survival would depend on people doing pull requests with refactorings, but you have to be Stockfish to hope for that, because nobody would sacrifice their time and labor for a poor chess engine wannabe. Eventually, Mussaurus would be abandoned, and then who would need it. In this case better to put the failure out of its misery now than pretend it's going to make a difference.

[Ovyron]

It's like facing a much superior chess opponent and resigning the game after a few moves because, that guy was gonna beat you anyway, so what was the point of playing, right?