cdani wrote:Houdini wrote:shrapnel wrote:Have a hunch that some of those failed Patches work on Houdini.
Houdart may have used those to strengthen Houdini 6 remarkably.
That is why in Ingo Bauer's Test, Houdini is crushing Stockfish.
This is indeed the PERFECT way to beat Stockfish. Take the ideas (failed and successful) from the Open Stockfish Framework, improve upon them and adapt them to work on one's Private/Commercial Engine !
Of course, it would take an extremely talented Chess Programmer to do it, which condition Robert Houdart meets easily.
It always amazes me that even at a computer chess forum people have such simple ideas about engine development.
In the 50-60 Elo improvement of Houdini 6 there is literally nothing that comes from "failed" or even "successful patches" of Stockfish (and it's not for a lack of trying).
There are a lot of high-level similarities between today's top engines, but the low-level differences are such that it's very unlikely that a parameter tweak that works for one engine will also work for another engine (provided that the parameter even makes sense for the other engine).
And it's not as if there have been groundbreaking ideas in the SF code this year, it's been mainly tinkering around the edges. Just like Houdini, to be honest, but the edges and the tinkering are different
.
+1
Again since Andscacs 0.91, almost none of the Stockfish changes where compatible with Andscacs, and when it was, almost none of them worked. It's always like that.
Single/small teams of engine programmers know their code very well; in spite of their great number, almost none of current SF developers(with probably a few exceptions) knows what they are doing.
They just try this and that, but the code overview is lacking.
Besides, SF has already gone so far in specifications/frequently unreasonable specifications that still somehow work when tuned to each other, that Daniel might be right that SF development might be at a crucial time, when with current code base could not be achieved a lot.
Actually, we might have SF 9 and + 50 elo to SF 8 only in another full year, so by early fall 2018.
Also, interest from SF developers seems to be low in general.
Sometimes, an idea is more important than the specific implementation.
It might make you think in one or another direction, so it is not necessary to copy SF code one to one. It is true though that reasonable SF ideas this year have not been plentiful.
