Is Belka a Rybka?

[GenoM]

correlation table

# Pair Ponder hit Moves counted
1 Rybka 1.0 64-bit – Strelka 1.8 71.4 1875
2 Rybka 2.3.2a 64-bit – Fritz 11 68.0 1374

What about Fritz 11? Do anybody wants to call it 'Fritzka' and remove from all tournaments and rating lists?

You selection include only part of the engines

Uri

Hi Uri

Did you check Fritz or Loop or any other engine about similarity to Rybka in your test-positions before telling us here that ponder-hits are not so important?

My guess is no.

[GenoM]

Hi Uri,

Note that strelka has piece square table in the following array
static __int16 PieceSquareValue[12][64][2]

It does not use
static const int BishopLine to generate piece square table.

Just my opinion, maybe PieceSquareValue[12][64][2] has been precomputed from BishopLine, and in Belka the author of WildCat added the capability to change this values by providing a function to calculate this piece square tables based on BishopLine. Maybe it is just like what you are doing now with Strelka, you are trying to replace the precomputed stuff in Strelka with an equivalent function. Please look at the source code of Sloppy, it has a precomputed piece square tables that are derived also from those exact values from the BishopLine.

About the clone issue:

I have observed about the analysis of Strelka 1.8, Fruit 2.1, Toga 1.3.1, and Rybka 1.0beta in a certain position where my program has blundered that Strelka, Fruit and Toga has produced an odd behavior (maybe a bug) where they have a similar PV and score output although in varying depths, and Rybka has a completely different PV and score.

About the motives of the Strelka author:
Based on my observation, the Strelka author might want the whole computer chess community to know that Rybka wouldn't be that strong without borrowing ideas from Fruit. Maybe he has found out how Rybka works, that it is similar to Fruit, and to prove his point he decided to create an engine that is very similar to both engines, Fruit and Rybka, and name it deliberately to sound like Rybka to create a scandal to get the attention of the whole computer chess community.

Maybe he is against the idea of using/(borrowing ideas) from other peoples code for commercial purposes, thats why he has done this to Rybka. He may thought that if he would be called a cloner, by creating an engine that is based on Fruit and behaves like Rybka, the author of Rybka will be called a cloner as well.

I'm not saying that the author of Rybka is a cloner, I'm just trying to explain my theory of what might be the motivation of the Strelka author. I may be right and I may be completely wrong as well.

In my own program, I used a lot of ideas from Fruit, and from Glaurung. No copy/paste, just ideas based on how I understand them.

What I have to say is that knowing that the most efficient design for a wheel is a circle, why would somebody still continue using one that is octagon.

+1

[Uri Blass]

correlation table

# Pair Ponder hit Moves counted
1 Rybka 1.0 64-bit – Strelka 1.8 71.4 1875
2 Rybka 2.3.2a 64-bit – Fritz 11 68.0 1374

What about Fritz 11? Do anybody wants to call it 'Fritzka' and remove from all tournaments and rating lists?

You selection include only part of the engines

Uri

Hi Uri

Did you check Fritz or Loop or any other engine about similarity to Rybka in your test-positions before telling us here that ponder-hits are not so important?

My guess is no.

Your guess is correct and I do not have Fritz11 or loop
I only said that ponder hit in itself is not a proof otherwise micromax is a clone of many engines and the ccrl should correct their calculation of ponder hit statistics first before I can take seriously ponder hit statistics as an evidence.

Uri

[Rolf]

Serbia has long ago ratified all the international conventions about copyright. Just as Germany did, and Russia too.

You are just revealing what I am talking about from the beginning. You have prejudices if somebody is from Serbia, Russia, Romania or Scotland. I am asking for the same standards. The same standards for Osipov and Rajlich.

Osipov is not hiding, you know. You can find his email. A lot of persons know him. He is perfectly convinced that what he has done is legal. If Convekta sues him, they will know where to find him.

V. R. contacted Y. O. asking about reverse engineering (check on the kasparovchess forum).

About the sincerity loss: V. R. was never sincere. He very well knows that there is no place for sincerity in business.

Boban Stanojevic is my real name. I am a university teacher and a writer. You can find my name also as a chess player. I am not anonymous.

And I am not Boban for you: please use my surname.

Kind regards!

BS

Alone your claim or wish that the same standards should apply to Rajlich and Osipov is wrong. As up to this very moment Vas is a sober programmer who has created number one! While Osipov is nobody. He did nowhere in the past appear on a tournament and more, he has asmitted himself in several messages that he has done something illegal and wrong. But his motivation is more. He's arguing exactly the way you are, namely that he might be evil but if he's really evil and has done something wrong or false or unallowed that THEN also Vas has done something wrong or illegal. This is mainly the point.

Ethically this is nuts and unallowed. It's as if wanting to force someone who is sober but cant be reached by other programmers must somehow be brought into a situation where he must open his code to prove that he's sober. Then, if that is accomplished, everybody is happy, who is actually still unhappy, because he cant compete with Vas. This is the basic motivation of the existence of one Osipov.

And we all know against you claim that the copyright situation in Russia isnt the same as in the whole West Europe. That has nothing to do with prejudices. Perhaps the laws are similar but what ´counts in the end is the fact that Western lawyers cant get a title against someone who illegally misused copyrighted material out of Western software insustries.If you want by all means a telling example then I give you the music market.

The same with you. Serbia isnt a member in the EU, so if I wanted to get a title against you personally, I couldnt get it because of a practical barrier, otherwise you wouldnt talk so lightly and irresponsible against me and about the whole topic. What is also of interest is this: you claim to be this or that, you are a player this or that, but I cant check if you are really authentically this person. Of course the mentioned names might really and authentically exist. Know what I mean? Often people say, but look into the phonebook there in that country. But how could I know that you who is actually writing there is the one out of the phonebook. How this could be researched? Of course it's impossible to do. Unless in a Western country the similar laws are existing and then I could make a formal appeal. But in Russia or Serbia I couldnt.

All this isnt because I follow my prejudices but because of the objective situation.

[mjlef]

Here is an interesting experiment. Talke Belka 1.8.13. It comes with two files. One is a header file (EvalConsts.h) describing what some variables do. Although the comments ar ein Russian, I had a Bulgarian friend translate the comments for me. Variable names are very close to what is used in the Piece Square Table (PST.cpp) file that comes with Fruit. For example:

extern int BishopLine[8];

in Fruit this is:

static const int BishopLine[8] = {
-3, -1, +0, +1, +1, +0, -1, -3,
};

In fact, most of the names appear in Fruit and have the same apparent meanings. There are som new terms (not a lot), sveral involving a more detailed passed pawn evaluation.

So, I go to thinking. the person.txt file lets you set new values to be used for any of the terms in person.txt. If you have an empty person.txt, it reverst all values to whatever the defaults are. You can quikly figure out what the default values are by putting numbers in one line like this:

BishopLine 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

that would set these values to all 0. You then run a short search to a fixed depth, change the values and run again. When I did this, and used the fact written here that 3399 is a "pawn", so 33.9 would be 1/100 th a pawn (used in Fruit), the values for BishopLine when divided by 33.9 come out to:

-3, -1, 0, 1, 1, 0,-1, -3

Exactly the values used in Fruit 2.1. And this is true for all the "Line" variables I tried, and many of the other constants as well. If Belka is a clone it certainly has a lot of Fruit in it.

This seems to be evidence that the author starte dwith Fruit as a model, which I think was mentioned here.

Note that I looked at the code of strelka1.8 and did not find the string
BishopLine inside of it

I also looked for [8] because it may have a different name and I found no names that are about piece square table and I found only names that are about passed pawns.

Maybe Belka include parts of fruit that strelka does not have.

Uri

I have never seen Strelka code, just the apparent header file for Belka. One possibility is the piece square tables are already populated in Strelka, while Belka, being a development/test version, fills them in using a Fruit-like method of weights along files and columns. You might find tables indexed for pieces in Strelka with something like 64 values (one for each board square) and just already filled in. Things like BishopLine just make it easier to change weights while you experiment.

Mark

[ozziejoe]

Rolf, you are making some excellent points. I do not quite understand this hostility towards Vas and the attempt to connect him to someone who ahs admited to engaging in questionable "programing" practices

J

[Rolf]

Hi Uri,

Note that strelka has piece square table in the following array
static __int16 PieceSquareValue[12][64][2]

It does not use
static const int BishopLine to generate piece square table.

Just my opinion, maybe PieceSquareValue[12][64][2] has been precomputed from BishopLine, and in Belka the author of WildCat added the capability to change this values by providing a function to calculate this piece square tables based on BishopLine. Maybe it is just like what you are doing now with Strelka, you are trying to replace the precomputed stuff in Strelka with an equivalent function. Please look at the source code of Sloppy, it has a precomputed piece square tables that are derived also from those exact values from the BishopLine.

About the clone issue:

I have observed about the analysis of Strelka 1.8, Fruit 2.1, Toga 1.3.1, and Rybka 1.0beta in a certain position where my program has blundered that Strelka, Fruit and Toga has produced an odd behavior (maybe a bug) where they have a similar PV and score output although in varying depths, and Rybka has a completely different PV and score.

About the motives of the Strelka author:
Based on my observation, the Strelka author might want the whole computer chess community to know that Rybka wouldn't be that strong without borrowing ideas from Fruit. Maybe he has found out how Rybka works, that it is similar to Fruit, and to prove his point he decided to create an engine that is very similar to both engines, Fruit and Rybka, and name it deliberately to sound like Rybka to create a scandal to get the attention of the whole computer chess community.

Maybe he is against the idea of using/(borrowing ideas) from other peoples code for commercial purposes, thats why he has done this to Rybka. He may thought that if he would be called a cloner, by creating an engine that is based on Fruit and behaves like Rybka, the author of Rybka will be called a cloner as well.

I'm not saying that the author of Rybka is a cloner, I'm just trying to explain my theory of what might be the motivation of the Strelka author. I may be right and I may be completely wrong as well.

In my own program, I used a lot of ideas from Fruit, and from Glaurung. No copy/paste, just ideas based on how I understand them.

What I have to say is that knowing that the most efficient design for a wheel is a circle, why would somebody still continue using one that is octagon.

Thanks for that message. Independently we came to same conclusion or hypothesis. You have described very well how Osipov might have thought or argued to explsain his motivastion but I think it's clear that this is wrong what he's trying to prove. You admit that you also took several ideas from Fruit which is IMO allowed. It's not forbiddeen to understand the ideas of others. Ideas are used by everybody. But to create a clone and argue that this now looks like this Rybka and that therefore Rybka must be also a clone, this is a form of ill-intended waste of time and energy. I for one find it remarkable how Vas behaves in view of such a scapegoating. Just as he showed extremely well-thought group-motivating leadership, never before so many have participated in the further development of this engine. Normally it works way different in the computerchess business.

[matejst]

Quote: "The same with you. Serbia isnt a member in the EU, so if I wanted to get a title against you personally, I couldnt get it because of a practical barrier, otherwise you wouldnt talk so lightly and irresponsible against me and about the whole topic. What is also of interest is this: you claim to be this or that, you are a player this or that, but I cant check if you are really authentically this person. Of course the mentioned names might really and authentically exist. Know what I mean? Often people say, but look into the phonebook there in that country. But how could I know that you who is actually writing there is the one out of the phonebook. How this could be researched? Of course it's impossible to do. Unless in a Western country the similar laws are existing and then I could make a formal appeal. But in Russia or Serbia I couldnt."

After such nonsense... I am amazed.

Kind regards!

BS

[GenoM]

Quote: "The same with you. Serbia isnt a member in the EU, so if I wanted to get a title against you personally, I couldnt get it because of a practical barrier, otherwise you wouldnt talk so lightly and irresponsible against me and about the whole topic. What is also of interest is this: you claim to be this or that, you are a player this or that, but I cant check if you are really authentically this person. Of course the mentioned names might really and authentically exist. Know what I mean? Often people say, but look into the phonebook there in that country. But how could I know that you who is actually writing there is the one out of the phonebook. How this could be researched? Of course it's impossible to do. Unless in a Western country the similar laws are existing and then I could make a formal appeal. But in Russia or Serbia I couldnt."

After such nonsense... I am amazed.

Kind regards!

BS

You simply did not know Rolf. He knows everything and is always right.

[matejst]

I'll take it easy .

Pozdrav!

BS