A Crossroad in Computer Chess; Or Desperate Flailing for Relevance

[dkappe]

Could you please explain it to me then? If I'm missing crucial information, I'm perfectly happy to change my view when presented with additional information which brings my current view into question.

I’m happy to explain things to someone who listens and discusses in good faith. Your posts here and in other threads demonstrate amply that is not true in your case. The prospect of unpacking to you the history of that project and of that particular incident makes me feel indescribably tired and depressed. Now go ahead and have the last word, as is your habit.

[AndrewGrant]

Could you please explain it to me then? If I'm missing crucial information, I'm perfectly happy to change my view when presented with additional information which brings my current view into question.

I’m happy to explain things to someone who listens and discusses in good faith. Your posts here and in other threads demonstrate amply that is not true in your case. The prospect of unpacking to you the history of that project and of that particular incident makes me feel indescribably tired and depressed.

:shrug: I'm here if you want to enlighten me. Otherwise, I'll stick to my story. I obviously don't have complete information. I know as much as that blog post, and the comments that were made public at the time. If there's more to it, you could convince not just me, but many others as well I reckon. I'm willing to entertain any idea, even if I don't agree with it, so long as its argued thoroughly.

Now go ahead and have the last word, as is your habit.

I would like our exchange to end with me saying "Okay, I see your point of view, I can concede some ground to you", or "I see what you are saying, but I don't see how this changes the original premise", after listening to your side of things, and asking questions to gather more insight.

[Tony P.]

Its a shame to see any project use and abuse the work that went into Leela.

There's a big rant below, beware...

If you fear that your work will be abused, you have other options: 1) not to start, 2) keep the code private, 3) charge for it.

Out of the major deep learning libraries, the only one that's under a GNU license* is OpenNN. Who is still using it? * Namely, LGPL, the one that obliges devs to allow users to RE the entire code that calls the however small covered lib, to give the users the power to debug mods of the lib instead of simply rolling the breaking changes back and happily using the product as it was

Google has released Tensorflow under Apache 2.0, but that hasn't prevented it from making money off consulting businesses on the reuse of that lib and renting out TPUs, and indirectly off the reputation boost. It's been a win-win. Google has also released a lot of small codebases supplementing its papers (Alpha Zero was just too large and important to be donated). Likewise, the sponsors of MXNet likely don't regret releasing it under that license, and FB doesn't regret opening PyTorch under modified BSD.

Just by making Leela available to Caruana, Ding and the other super-GMs fully for free instead of ad-hominem freemium coaching services, the devs have missed out on a 5 (maybe 6) figure amount. (Well, that was a consequence of Glaurung's GPL, but they could still have done the Fat Fritz cloud trick, for example.)

Btw, you're absolutely right not to release the training code for the Ethereal nets.

And fwiw, SF isn't a villain, beating it didn't save the humanity Leela just improved the SOTA a little and gave us a different flavor of chess (the latter had also been done by Fizbo, iCE, Wasp, Rodent et al. without beating SF). Even Komodo isn't a villain, it's affordable and would provide decent chess knowledge even if SF didn't exist.

[noobpwnftw]

People like H shouldn't have done what they did, however, there is not so much for "good faith" in computer chess programming anyways, this forum is full of it and I'm gladly contributing my part.

[towforce]

Google has released Tensorflow under Apache 2.0, but that hasn't prevented it from making money off consulting businesses on the reuse of that lib and renting out TPUs, and indirectly off the reputation boost...

I'm a fan of Google, and they have released a huge amount of code in many areas into open source - and a lot of it is of very good quality. I don't know why they've done it (I suspect in some cases it stifles potential competitors), but I have personally benefited from using several of their open source libraries. A lot of the time, it just looks like generosity: they've made something good, and they're not going to sell it, so they give it away.

[Kiudee]

Just by making Leela available to Caruana, Ding and the other super-GMs fully for free instead of ad-hominem freemium coaching services, the devs have missed out on a 5 (maybe 6) figure amount. (Well, that was a consequence of Glaurung's GPL, but they could still have done the Fat Fritz cloud trick, for example.)

Interesting, how some people immediately think about how they can make money with something. The phrasing “missing out” somehow implying that it is your duty as a proper homo economicus to extract all the money you can.
One aspect which is overlooked here is that Leela Chess Zero and Stockfish are where they are because they are free and open. Leela would have never been a reality, if it wouldn’t have been supported by the large group of contributors.

[mvanthoor]

His (rightly) concern is that engine authors download the latest SF NNUE net and gain a free xx elo. Example, suppose I add NNUE (I won't, but suppose) to ProDeo and get and 150 elo gain on the rating lists because of that. 6-7 months later -- having changed not one bit on my engine -- I download the latest SF net, it gives me a free 30-50 elo, I release it and rub my hands seeing ProDeo climb and climb in the rating lists. I would say that's a very unhealthy situation and surely this (kind of things) is what's going to happen in the near future.

So while NNUE is a fantastic new development regarding increasing strength it has an unwished negative side effect and I can understand that some engine authors already now consider to stop.

The solution is simple. Split the rating lists:

1. One for 'classic' engines without any neural networks.
2. One for 'hybrid' engines that use classic stuff but also some sort of neural network add-on.
3. One for 'full' neural network engines such as Leela.

Then everyone can compete in exactly the space they want; people who want to compete with classic engines with hand-crafted evaluation (with eval tuning as the only automated option) can do so without getting frustrated of seeing other engines pass their own just because they got a NNUE added; if they do, those engines go to the 2nd rating list. People who are into generating and researching different networks can compete with other networks on the third list.

[fabianVDW]

The solution is simple. Split the rating lists:

1. One for 'classic' engines without any neural networks.
2. One for 'hybrid' engines that use classic stuff but also some sort of neural network add-on.
3. One for 'full' neural network engines such as Leela.

Then everyone can compete in exactly the space they want; people who want to compete with classic engines with hand-crafted evaluation (with eval tuning as the only automated option) can do so without getting frustrated of seeing other engines pass their own just because they got a NNUE added; if they do, those engines go to the 2nd rating list. People who are into generating and researching different networks can compete with other networks on the third list.

Where is the line? A PSQT is an in NNUE fashion incrementally updated Perceptron. Or do we only start calling it NN when it has multiple layers? Or perhaps when the inputs are more sparse, like a KingxPiece ([64][64]) table(which I've recently added to FabChess)?

[Tony P.]

Interesting, how some people immediately think about how they can make money with something. The phrasing “missing out” somehow implying that it is your duty as a proper homo economicus to extract all the money you can.

It's rather about bridging the gap between the work we love to do and the work we have to do to maintain ourselves. It's rather about making our hobby profitable so that we can afford to reduce the hours of daytime slavery.

[Dann Corbit]

Interesting, how some people immediately think about how they can make money with something. The phrasing “missing out” somehow implying that it is your duty as a proper homo economicus to extract all the money you can.

It's rather about bridging the gap between the work we love to do and the work we have to do to maintain ourselves. It's rather about making our hobby profitable so that we can afford to reduce the hours of daytime slavery.

I think trying to make money on computer chess is a mistake.
That is because people who are talented enough to write a winning chess engine can make far more money programming something else
Secondly, and more importantly, when you change chess programming from a hobby into a profession, it goes from fun to work
Now you must support it, now you must document it, now you must continue to make progress.
Sucks all the fun right out of it.

Now, there are a special few who can make money at chess programming. But I strongly suspect that they are driven by the intellectual challenge of chess programming and not the money in it, because there's not much money in it