What is going on with those Stockfish clones?

[rdhoffmann]

What is the purpose of cloning the Stockfish repo, changing a few things and calling it your own?

I browsed the source code of a >3000 engine I stumbled upon from the CCRL list by chance, and the authors didn't even bother to rename most of the classes.

[Mike Sherwin]

What is the purpose of cloning the Stockfish repo, changing a few things and calling it your own?

I browsed the source code of a >3000 engine I stumbled upon from the CCRL list by chance, and the authors didn't even bother to rename most of the classes.

You are walking in the desert and you find a dead horse ...

You are walking in the jungle and you find a giant statue and you stand on its shoulders ...

You find yourself in a den of thieves so you don a hood and cloak ...

You buy high quality electronics and find on the bottom, made in China ...

You see the Jones across the street have a brand new car ...

Feel free to add to this list.

[Modern Times]

What is the purpose of cloning the Stockfish repo, changing a few things and calling it your own?

Completely pointless, but the GPL allows it so people do it.

[rdhoffmann]

What annoys me is if the CCRL list is dominated by such clones, it is a somewhat pointless list. Now I don't know if that is true yet, that particular engine however was the only one above 3000 where I bothered to peek at the source code, and it was already an obvious ripoff. Given how incredibly hard it is to get near 3000 let alone higher, I fear this may not be the only one.

Perhaps we could have our own ranking list of independent chess engines here, plus one or more reference engines (e.g. official Stockfish, Leela, Hermann). I think this would be cool and easy to do, a database of like 10k games would be fully sufficient if the list of participants is much smaller than CCRL. The results could be updated once a month and stickied here. Just an idea

[Modern Times]

What annoys me is if the CCRL list is dominated by such clones..

But it isn't is it ? Please name them all.

[Ras]

Completely pointless, but the GPL allows it so people do it.

The GPL allows forking, but not passing it as one's own. The authors need to be named.

[ernest]

But it isn't is it ? Please name them all.

From what I can see (CCRL 40/15 "Complete list"), ShashChess and SugaR AI

[Modern Times]

2 engine out of over 500. I would say derivative rather than clone, the GPL permits and even encourages this, it is curious that people have an issue with such derivatives when that is the case. However I'd prefer them not to be on ratings lists. They serve no useful purpose.

[Graham Banks]

Completely pointless, but the GPL allows it so people do it.

The GPL allows forking, but not passing it as one's own. The authors need to be named.

Those are the only two SF derivatives that I will test, so you don't need to worry about others.

[smatovic]

IMO we have to trust/rely here on the rating list organizers, it is up to them to decide which derivative is worth to test and which is too clony, banning all derivatives by default is the wrong way, there might be original work in a fork present.

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Srdja