Komodo 8 Chessbase

[Paloma]

http://vlasak.biz/evcnews.htm -08/25/2014-

and

http://www.euroschach.de/Komodo-Schach- ... spiel.html

[Modern Times]

Well spotted ! Nothing in the chessbase shop so far.

A big surprise, but a good call I think to release through them. They handle all the support, which takes that burden away from Mark and Larry so they can concentrate on product improvement.

[Rebel]

Just when I thought I had seen everything.

Komodo is a great program but leans heavily on scrutinized Ippolit, the legacy of Vas. Komodo author, member and driving force behind the ICGA fiasco now profiting.

Real life wins from Hollywood script writers.

[Sedat Canbaz]

I wonder, is this version of Komodo stronger than Stockfish ?

[lkaufman]

Just when I thought I had seen everything.

Komodo is a great program but leans heavily on scrutinized Ippolit, the legacy of Vas. Komodo author, member and driving force behind the ICGA fiasco now profiting.

Real life wins from Hollywood script writers.

There is certainly a fair amount of similarity in the evaluation functions of Rybka 3, Ippolit, and Komodo, but as the primary "evaluation guy" of both Rybka 3 and Komodo I can hardly be faulted for using many of my own ideas in both Rybka 3 and in Komodo. Vas and Don wrote the actual eval code in Rybka and Komodo respectively (excluding what Mark has added in the past year) and the result is quite different code, while the eval weights were tuned independently so they are not similar.
Regarding the search I can say that although we (Don and I) did study both the Ippolit and Glaurung (later Stockfish) code quite a bit, we ended up keeping few of the Ippolit ideas that are not also in Glaurung or Stockfish or older engines like Fruit. I think Komodo has more original search ideas than any other top engine. If I want to give credit to other programs to open-source engines from which we got ideas, I would put Glaurung ahead of Ippolit or Rybka, and of course those engines got many ideas from Fruit and from older engines. Even to this day I still don't understand why Ippolit and derivatives are so much stronger in bullet chess than in slow chess.
In conclusion, I think it would be quite just for the Komodo team to benefit from ideas used in Rybka 3 (even if they are few in number), since I was half of each team! But frankly, neither Mark nor I makes more than a small fraction of what we would made doing other work (programming in his case, chess teaching/writing in mine); Komodo is not a good project financially for either of us. We just enjoy working on it.

[shrapnel]

When is the Komodo 8 standalone Engine being released ?

[lkaufman]

I can't answer that yet, I actually don't know myself as it depends on other people. We'll have more to say about it soon.

Larry

[Rebel]

Just when I thought I had seen everything.

Komodo is a great program but leans heavily on scrutinized Ippolit, the legacy of Vas. Komodo author, member and driving force behind the ICGA fiasco now profiting.

Real life wins from Hollywood script writers.

There is certainly a fair amount of similarity in the evaluation functions of Rybka 3, Ippolit, and Komodo, but as the primary "evaluation guy" of both Rybka 3 and Komodo I can hardly be faulted for using many of my own ideas in both Rybka 3 and in Komodo. Vas and Don wrote the actual eval code in Rybka and Komodo respectively (excluding what Mark has added in the past year) and the result is quite different code, while the eval weights were tuned independently so they are not similar.
Regarding the search I can say that although we (Don and I) did study both the Ippolit and Glaurung (later Stockfish) code quite a bit, we ended up keeping few of the Ippolit ideas that are not also in Glaurung or Stockfish or older engines like Fruit. I think Komodo has more original search ideas than any other top engine. If I want to give credit to other programs to open-source engines from which we got ideas, I would put Glaurung ahead of Ippolit or Rybka, and of course those engines got many ideas from Fruit and from older engines. Even to this day I still don't understand why Ippolit and derivatives are so much stronger in bullet chess than in slow chess.
In conclusion, I think it would be quite just for the Komodo team to benefit from ideas used in Rybka 3 (even if they are few in number), since I was half of each team! But frankly, neither Mark nor I makes more than a small fraction of what we would made doing other work (programming in his case, chess teaching/writing in mine); Komodo is not a good project financially for either of us. We just enjoy working on it.

The irony of ruining Vas' business (by Lefler) and then take from Vas 400 elo legacy and make money out of it, now notable via Chessbase is unbearable.

Don is one case, Lefler is another case of a different magnitude due to his leading role in the ICGA fiasco.

Without Ippolit and friends Rybka 4.1 would still top the rating lists.

[pohl4711]

I can't answer that yet, I actually don't know myself as it depends on other people. We'll have more to say about it soon.

Larry

What I (and all other testers) need, is a UCI-Komodo 8, which runs on Shredder GUI, LittleBlitzer, cutechess...and not a ChessBase-native-version, which only works with the FritzGUI.

Stefan

[Sedat Canbaz]

Larry,

Can you inform me please:

Is this version of Komodo stronger than latest releases of Stockfish ?