The most stupid idea by the Stockfish Team

[Damir]

is by putting default network inside Stockfish exe. Now each exe will be over 21 MB.. What if I don't want to use the network Stockfish team put? It is stupid as it gets... stupid stupid stupid

[Damir]

I would prefer to manually install and remove the network file if I am not happy with it and use another one... Now with the network file inside the exe this option is no longer possible..

[AndrewGrant]

There is utility in packaging them together. The vast majority of Stockfish users are not people who frequent any forums like this.

If you really want to be ahead of the curve, just compile your own Stockfishs yourself.

[Kieren Pearson]

This is similar to how people on this forum were complaining about the hybrid NNUE / classic eval which gained elo and wanted a pure NNUE. Outside of computer chess enthusiasts, most people want to just be able to download the engine and have it work (with default settings be as strong as possible) with minimal fuss.

[F.Huber]

Outside of computer chess enthusiasts, most people want to just be able to download the engine and have it work (with default settings be as strong as possible) with minimal fuss.

Most people? I would say that's true only for 5% of idiots, who are not able to download the network file and put it into the same folder as the Stockfish engine!
The Stockfish developers should now rename their engine to FatFish.
And maybe their next cracy steps will be embedding a 20MB opening book and tablebases with a few hundred MB -
then even AdipositasFish would be an appropriate name.

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi there,

same opinion, F.Huber wrote before!

The current Stockfish is around 28 Elo stronger as Stockfish 11 (tested with a version middle of August vs. 40 other engines and longer time controls on fast intel hardware). So Stockfish is with around 3360 Elo strong enough for persons not able to download the NNUE file and put it in the same directory.

Or we have in the near future a lot of other FAT programs because most will copy that bad idea!
The next problem!

Best
Frank

[Frank Quisinsky]

+28 Elo (without NNUE) and I am using not the better compile for i9-10900.
So maybe max. 35 Elo stronger as Stockfish 11.

Forgot to write!

[khalidomar]

is by putting default network inside Stockfish exe. Now each exe will be over 21 MB.. What if I don't want to use the network Stockfish team put? It is stupid as it gets... stupid stupid stupid

I agree, it is not a great idea!

It is like if BrainFish already contained cerebellum embedded in the exe

You can, however, use a local network file if you specify its name in the EvalFile parameter, at least that is what SF team wrote in the comments of this patch

Embed default net, and simplify using non-default nets

covers the most important cases from the user perspective:

It embeds the default net in the binary, so a download of that binary will result
in a working engine with the default net. The engine will be functional in the default mode
without any additional user action.

It allows non-default nets to be used, which will be looked for in up to
three directories (working directory, location of the binary, and optionally a specific default directory).
This mechanism is also kept for those developers that use MSVC,
the one compiler that doesn't have an easy mechanism for embedding data.

[syzygy]

The people who are complaining here, where do they get their Stockfish executable from?

If you compile yourself, you can compile without the embedded network file. Is that a problem?

If you get it from abrok, why not ask the abrok guy to compile dev versions without embedded network file (saves him bandwidth and storage space and surely people who use abrok builds should be able to configure the network file correctly).

Is there any real problem?


(In my view the main problem is that compiling without embedded file could have been made much more easy. One could have left "make profile-build" as it was and added "make profile-build embed=yes" for a build with embedded file, or perhaps "make fatfish". But this would mainly be something to keep life nicer for developers who need to compile repeatedly.)

[schack]

Biggest problem for now is that embedding is creating false positives on some systems.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file-ana ... /detection