Comments by rescharn

Hi Mats, please have a look on that, what you have said. You are using such
names like 'central squares' or 'established chess laws'. But that kind
of arguing is just the problem. Why are central squares that important?
Where is the center in different chess960 games, where the king himself
might be decentralized? By that you learn, that such categories are
derived from more essential but abstract things. 

Another more transparent example are the average piece exchange values:
where do those traditional values come from? What is with that at
different variants? At my webpage you will find a simple theory to derive
such values even for unusual piece types or board sizes. As I tried to
tell you, I am not interested in that kind of chess knowledge, where it at
least leads to a simple implementing of a copycat behaviour. 

If you want to create an effective and INTELLIGENT chess program, you
first have to UNDERSTAND the basics of chess, not to imitate the so called
chess knowledge, which is moreover differing enormously depending on which
chess master you will ask. Then you will have to TRANSLATE it into the
world and language of a CPU.

Today there are a lot of effective but mostly huge chess programs. So
there is no urgent need for to write another one. But on the other side
there are very few intelligently working approaches using instead very
restricted means. I am arguing for to have computer chess program
tournaments with LIMITED means, especially targeting the persistant storage
size including the program executeable. They should be bound to a special
upper bound. And it should be measured in a packed form e.g. as RAR for to
skip inner redundancies as generated depending of the selected computer
language and to avoid the temptation to undergo any limits by including
packed knowledge.

The future of SMIRF: well, in the meantime there have been some questions
from different sides, what will be with SMIRF. 

First, I am about to migrate it to the Mac OS X. That is, because I am
angry about MS Vista and its unsufficient driver set (especially 64 Bit),
its bad behaviour against programmers and its several backdoors for
government, police or secret service investigations targeting every file
on a Vista system (as I prosume). In contrast Mac OS X is again going to
create a homegeneous 64 Bit user landscape starting with coming OS X
Leopard version.

SMIRF will become 64 Bit then. There will be no big speed step by that,
because SMIRF is no a bitboard based program. But it will use the grown
register set, and it will then benefit from any compiler optimization
improvement. I remember days, where I investigated to have an ARM RISC
processor based solution, but there are currently no fast desktop systems
or sponsors, which would provide me with such a development environment.
Thus I stay on Intel/AMD64 based hardware (unfortunately also without any
sponsor yet).

SMIRF will not be merely migrated to Mac OS X. I intend to have a lot of
new design elements:

a) redesign the internal data structure and caching logic
b) rewrite the position detail evaluation function (which is still the
first slow draft, may be a 200% speed up then)
c) support additionally also an additional piece (General = N+B+R)
d) support blocked squares (to customize the playable square zone)
e) build in prompting (instead of badly working permanent brain)
f) attempt to implement multithreaded multiprocessor usage 
g) create a separated unit for to contain move logic and pgn file
maintenance beside of the GUI
h) attempt to have a UCI protocol based GUI

That is a huge project and will need a remarkable amount of my free time.
So do not wait for a finished Mac OS X version in the near future. May be
some of then made progresses will be reimplemented into the working
Windows 32 Bit solution, but from now on possible updates would only be
published for the donators' bonus version.

Reinhard.

Hi Mats, one of my first goals is to make SMIRF play self-containedly
especially through the opening stage. I am happy, that this works even for
randomized starting positions half-way sufficiently. To manipulate the
opening behaviour to gain more success simply by adding some quirks
instead of modifying the global model concept will destroy the chance of
finding an abstract and consistent base model. Still I am e.g. not fully
satisfied with my average piece value model, and the evaluation function
is three times as slow as necessary.

Nevertheless I have thoughts to distribute a predefined amount of
evaluation to be randomizedly disposed in chosing second class moves
during the beginning to gain a less determinated play at fixed opening
arrays. Actually I still recommend to play Chess960 or 10x8 CRC to have
more diversified game experiences.

Hi, Mats, beside of the fact, that the Windows distribution of SMIRF still
is the only one and just has been updated (in the bonus version), it does
not matter to me, how many people are using Smirf, but in contrast it
does, how many are really supporting it. And, because of this number is
nearly vanishing, I simply decided do migrate to Mac OS X because of
software political reasons.

Yesterday I have published on my web site my new model for calculating the
average piece exchange values for various gaits, both: simplified and
improved, at http://www.chessbox.de/Compu/schachansatz1_e.html. Reinhard.

Hi Mats, let me explain, that my understanding of AI is NOT simulating
anything but developing solutions genuine to machine. Intelligent behavior
is not merely imitating. Now, how to support the SMIRF project:

a) intellectually: by showing interest, writing comments, testing, giving
constructive critic, mentioning the SMIRF project where it would make
sense. There is no need to exceed intellectual limits, we all mostly are
specialists, thus don't worry when there will be gaps, I don't either.

b) financially: where fans like to use the SMIRF program, they should be
aware, that there are costs for organizing and maintaining hard and
software, e.g. actual development environments, and that it needs a lot of
time, wherein no money could be earned. Thus it makes sense to those people
to place some donations via paypal.

Well, Sam, I am not that rich, so it would help somehow to have some minor contributions e.g. for to buy some more recent development tools and for to update my hardware from time to time. But it is more disturbing to experience people seeing no value in such software as long it is free. Thus freeware is devaluating the scene and does a bull's job to chess variant software. Making the entry version of SMIRF a donationware should have been signaling that message, but most of SMIRF's users nevertheless mixed that kind of releasing up with freeware. 

Another demotivating detail is, that though I have tried to publish all of my chess pages using both German and English languages, no (as far as I know) native English speaking chess page had been turned to become bilingual too by also supporting German, that way following my example. This makes me feel like a second class person. Therefore I have decided to no longer continue such an approach, instead I will merely use my German language, if I ever would relaunch my web site again. 

Thus developing Octopus out of SMIRF's bones is done rather slowly and privately. That would not exclude really interested people from contacting me or following the project, nevertheless I am ignoring the public, e.g. by chosing Mac OS X as development system, saying 'sorry' to MS Vista, and by redirecting my old site to a small German language blogging site. Reinhard.