Graham Banks wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 12:19 pm
tpoppins wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 12:13 pm
Ethereal, Laser and Xiphos dead because they failed to produce an official release in the past month? This is a staggering notion, bordering on ludicrous.
That's not what I said. Certainly not what I meant. Let me explain.
Last official releases:
Ethereal 11.25 on 21 January 2019 -
See here
Laser 1.7 on 7 February 2019 -
See here
Xiphos 0.5 on 11 March 2019 -
See here
I get that these are the official releases and that they only happen twice a year at most, and sometimes as infrequently as every 2 or 3 years. The next will be Ethereal 11.50, laser 1.8. and Xiphos 0.6. I understand what an official release is.
What I meant when I said things like:
Gary Internet wrote: ↑Wed May 01, 2019 9:28 am
Laser hasn't had a patch since 24 March 2019 and OpenBench has fallen silent showing that there is nothing new in the works for Laser.
Xiphos hasn't had a patch since 30 March 2019, which for Xiphos, if you've followed its development to any extent on GitHub, you'll know is a long time to go without a patch.
Was that these sections of Github for
Laser and
Xiphos show that the engines haven't had a single patch added to them in over a month. I wasn't talking about an official release. I was talking about a
SINGLE PATCH. Not even a non-Elo gaining simplification. Nothing.
You might say that it doesn't mean anything. Fair enough.
Look at the front page of
OpenBench and you'll see Andrew Grant's words at the top explaining that he's stopped developing Ethereal. It may not be dead, but I feel that it will be dormant for long enough that it might as well be.
The Laser developer, Jeffrey An, who I believe was friends/friendly with Andrew Grant also used OpenBench to develop Laser.
If he was actively using OpenBench to develop Laser, it would be full of patches, either successful greens or unsuccessful reds and ambers. But it has nothing in it. The last entry from anyone was from Andrew Grant on 30 March 2019. If you look on
page 2 you can see the last failed patch that Jeffrey An attempted through OpenBench was on 21 March 2019. There is nothing in there from Jeffrey since.
Either Jeffrey has stopped working on Laser, or OpenBench has shut down because Andrew Grant has ceased development of Ethereal and Jeffrey is continuing to work on Laser using only one or two computers rather than a massive network of hundreds of cores. That would explain the slow down in development. I have a feeling however, that it's not a slow down. It's a stop. Time will tell.
Likewise the same thing has happened with Xiphos. There are no new patches on Github and I can't point to OpenBench in this instance because Milos Tatarevic, to my knowledge, has never had access to it to assist him in developing Xiphos.
What I can do however is point you to
this page which shows all the patches that Xiphos has on Github. As you scroll down from the top, starting on 27 February 2018, Xiphos has had multiple patches land in every single calendar month. It didn't miss a single month for 13 consecutive months, and then suddenly on 30 March 2019, we appear to stop, and there is nothing since.
Following the official release of 0.5 on 11 March 2019, we then had 3 patches land on 16, 20 and 30 March taking us through 0.5.1, 0.5.2 and finally to 0.5.3 which is the version you can see competing in TCEC and CCC right now. But that's where things end.
I'm genuinely wishing that Milos is still actively developing Xiphos behind the scenes because it's a great engine, but something about a one month gap (and growing) doesn't fill me with hope. Perhaps he's gone on month long vacation? It's plausible, but based on the evidence we can see on Github, it seems like an uncharacteristically long gap to me.
I'll leave it there for now, but I will return to this once we get to Division 1 of TCEC Season 16, and let you know if 0.5.3 is still playing, or if we're looking at something like 0.5.18. I'm praying for the latter.