Komodo 9 Announcement

[Lanzo]

Larry, is it true that you and Mark are obsessed beyond imagination with Stockfish and that you cleverly stole some code from it? Ofcourse, you'll deny like the deceitful grandmaster you are.

[MikeB]

Excellent. Of course, at $40/year, there would be no reason not to subscribe. Factor in the inflation since the early 90's and you have a compelling product compared to the pricing in the 90's.

Really appreciate the fact that you have a Mac version as well.

I'm all in.

All the best, Mike

[zamar]

Larry, is it true that you and Mark are obsessed beyond imagination with Stockfish and that you cleverly stole some code from it? Ofcourse, you'll deny like the deceitful grandmaster you are.

Stockfish is something comparable to a public library or to a public research article.There is absolutely nothing shameful or immoral in carefully studying it or analyzing the source code to death or using the ideas in other engines.

So can you please shut up?

[lkaufman]

Larry, is it true that you and Mark are obsessed beyond imagination with Stockfish and that you cleverly stole some code from it? Ofcourse, you'll deny like the deceitful grandmaster you are.

Taking code directly from SF wouldn't make sense, as the programs are too different for copy and paste to help. We certainly have felt free to use general ideas from Stockfish; I think one that was a definite help to us was the concept of "improving" moves. But we don't pay close attention to every development in Stockfish, because most of them simply don't apply to us. They may be tuning some parameter (we tune our own parameters, never relying on anyone else for this), or rewriting code (again, not applicable to us), or even changing something to make it more like the way we already do it (that happens quite a bit, but I'm not accusing anyone of decompiling Komodo). We have tried making the search and/or parts of the eval very similar to Stockfish, but that always just makes us weaker.
Frankly, we cannot explain why Stockfish outsearches Komodo 9 by nearly four ply at normal blitz levels, even on single core and despite Komodo 9 outsearching Komodo 8 by a ply or more. One ply difference is easily explained by some extensions we do, but the rest is a total mystery. If we try to duplicate the Stockfish search as much as is practical in Komodo, a large depth difference remains. Despite our inability to account for this, Komodo 9 appears to be as strong as or stronger than Stockfish.
So while we don't mind using new ideas that appear in Stockfish, in practice so far this has been of only marginal value to Komodo.

[APassionForCriminalJustic]

Larry, is it true that you and Mark are obsessed beyond imagination with Stockfish and that you cleverly stole some code from it? Ofcourse, you'll deny like the deceitful grandmaster you are.

Taking code directly from SF wouldn't make sense, as the programs are too different for copy and paste to help. We certainly have felt free to use general ideas from Stockfish; I think one that was a definite help to us was the concept of "improving" moves. But we don't pay close attention to every development in Stockfish, because most of them simply don't apply to us. They may be tuning some parameter (we tune our own parameters, never relying on anyone else for this), or rewriting code (again, not applicable to us), or even changing something to make it more like the way we already do it (that happens quite a bit, but I'm not accusing anyone of decompiling Komodo). We have tried making the search and/or parts of the eval very similar to Stockfish, but that always just makes us weaker.
Frankly, we cannot explain why Stockfish outsearches Komodo 9 by nearly four ply at normal blitz levels, even on single core and despite Komodo 9 outsearching Komodo 8 by a ply or more. One ply difference is easily explained by some extensions we do, but the rest is a total mystery. If we try to duplicate the Stockfish search as much as is practical in Komodo, a large depth difference remains. Despite our inability to account for this, Komodo 9 appears to be as strong as or stronger than Stockfish.
So while we don't mind using new ideas that appear in Stockfish, in practice so far this has been of only marginal value to Komodo.

Larry, do you guys have any test runs between the latest development version of Stockfish versus Komodo 9? We all know that the latest development version is about or close to 25 ELO over Stockfish 6 at single core - and the difference is nearly 60+ ELO when the cores equal approximately 16 or greater.

[lkaufman]

Larry, is it true that you and Mark are obsessed beyond imagination with Stockfish and that you cleverly stole some code from it? Ofcourse, you'll deny like the deceitful grandmaster you are.

Taking code directly from SF wouldn't make sense, as the programs are too different for copy and paste to help. We certainly have felt free to use general ideas from Stockfish; I think one that was a definite help to us was the concept of "improving" moves. But we don't pay close attention to every development in Stockfish, because most of them simply don't apply to us. They may be tuning some parameter (we tune our own parameters, never relying on anyone else for this), or rewriting code (again, not applicable to us), or even changing something to make it more like the way we already do it (that happens quite a bit, but I'm not accusing anyone of decompiling Komodo). We have tried making the search and/or parts of the eval very similar to Stockfish, but that always just makes us weaker.
Frankly, we cannot explain why Stockfish outsearches Komodo 9 by nearly four ply at normal blitz levels, even on single core and despite Komodo 9 outsearching Komodo 8 by a ply or more. One ply difference is easily explained by some extensions we do, but the rest is a total mystery. If we try to duplicate the Stockfish search as much as is practical in Komodo, a large depth difference remains. Despite our inability to account for this, Komodo 9 appears to be as strong as or stronger than Stockfish.
So while we don't mind using new ideas that appear in Stockfish, in practice so far this has been of only marginal value to Komodo.

Larry, do you guys have any test runs between the latest development version of Stockfish versus Komodo 9? We all know that the latest development version is about or close to 25 ELO over Stockfish 6 at single core - and the difference is nearly 60+ ELO when the cores equal approximately 16 or greater.

I'm doing a run now against the latest SF on single core, at 2' + 1". As you would expect, we're running a bit behind so far; I'll post final result later. Which would win at a "normal" time control remains to be seen. As already reported, on 16 cores we won by 14 elo against current SF, but of course few people have 16 cores.

[kgburcham]

Larry, is it true that you and Mark are obsessed beyond imagination with Stockfish and that you cleverly stole some code from it? Ofcourse, you'll deny like the deceitful grandmaster you are.

Vas quit it.
Vas go away unless you are going to improve your own program and leave Larry alone.

[Astatos]

Whenever Stockfish or earlier Houdini or Critter where doing a step forward Komodo follows in short course. Of course all this is totally accidental, nobody ever thought that might be a correlation. I am guessing that whenever Stockfish hit the wall, by sheer coincidence Komodo will lose steam also.

[Graham Banks]

Whenever Stockfish or earlier Houdini or Critter where doing a step forward Komodo follows in short course. Of course all this is totally accidental, nobody ever thought that might be a correlation. I am guessing that whenever Stockfish hit the wall, by sheer coincidence Komodo will lose steam also.

The world is always full of conspiracy theories, most of which are utter nonsense.

It's quite clear to me that Stockfish and Komodo play differently.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Whenever Stockfish or earlier Houdini or Critter where doing a step forward Komodo follows in short course. Of course all this is totally accidental, nobody ever thought that might be a correlation. I am guessing that whenever Stockfish hit the wall, by sheer coincidence Komodo will lose steam also.

The world is always full of conspiracy theories, most of which are utter nonsense.

It's quite clear to me that Stockfish and Komodo play differently.

Fully agreed

Their playing style are completely different....
Dr.D