what is left in computer chess programming

[Jhoravi]

A chess engine that understands closed games!!!

[Ryan Benitez]

It seems we have run out of ideas in improving programs.
Everyone has run out of tune ideas.
There are no other programs left to get ideas from.
Most of the programmers are tired or retired or out of ideas.

One time I thought Shredder was amazing.
Then I thought Tiger was amazing.
When Rybka came along I was amazed by its moves.
Then Houdini comes along and can beat Rybka.
Then Stockfish with it crazy eval wins some.

I wonder what programs in the next few years will top what we have now.
I wonder what improvements it will take for programs to play better than what we have now.

Next is to remove the programmer from the program.

In some way that has almost already been done. I say almost because the contributors to Stockfish are still contributing much better than random code. The system though is now more important than the programmers. The community through a system of mass contribution of CPU time now owns a top level chess program that requires no full time programmer to continue to improve.

[Jhoravi]

Now that AMD Kaveri with HSA is out. It's just a matter of time we can finally utilize the full GPU power for chess!

[Kempelen]

It seems we have run out of ideas in improving programs.
Everyone has run out of tune ideas.
There are no other programs left to get ideas from.
Most of the programmers are tired or retired or out of ideas.

One time I thought Shredder was amazing.
Then I thought Tiger was amazing.
When Rybka came along I was amazed by its moves.
Then Houdini comes along and can beat Rybka.
Then Stockfish with it crazy eval wins some.

I wonder what programs in the next few years will top what we have now.
I wonder what improvements it will take for programs to play better than what we have now.
It will take someone with a lot of energy and dedication and a lot of time to improve what we have now.
The improvements in the next few years will be interesting.
Maybe all of the program buying suckers will buy the $29.95 programs with just an improvement of 5 elo with each new release.
I think I will just move to Denver.

kgburcham

I am not absolute agree with you. First challenge is to build a working engine, second challenge is tune it to make it strong. This could give you same years (although you are a genious progammer). During the course of this proccess I have seen I can put own ideas, maybe not as "big ideas", but lot of micro-ideas. Making your own implementation is putting you own ideas in how the code works, and from time to time, in my case three or four times I had my own unique good ideas in my engine. Also there are a lot of room in certain areas, I think, but none investigate much about it: automatic tuning, natural language (a'la Fritz 5: verbose output), making a funny engine and not a best one (I remember Chess System Tal II), .... You say there are no ideas, but there are some of them to investigate: what happen is undiscover ideas are difficult to discover, you must put effort in to find them.

If you bore about writing a chess engine, you have hundres of other sites where put your efforts, but remember, at least for me this is a hobbie, not a competition to make the best one. I only want to build a strong engine I can understand....