I think this is exactly one of FL's complaints. For some reason the Rybka Forum likes to imagine that somehow the ICGA (or maybe the cloners) have "ruined" VR, forced him out of the business, or whatever -- when they overlook the actual fact that this is exactly what happened when Rybka appeared as a "Fruit derivative".... he already made lots of money very quickly from the long hard work of others that will likely never be realized in computer chess again.
I don't have all the details, but the famed 051103 version of Fruit (dated Nov 3 2005 but didn't appear until years later -- and looks just as strong as R1, if not better) might have been held up in its release due to the licensing contract talks with Convekta, and when these were scuppered by Rybka appearing, by that time FL had more pressing personal issues to which to attend, while Benitez took a different development path. It is only speculation, but perhaps with an inital cash infusion for serious testing equipment, Fruit would have gained something similar to the 280 Elo (exaggerated to 400 by various) between R1 and R4.1 over the next years.
Put another way, the use of Fruit-derived code in R1 already provided a huge boost in the world of opportunities to VR (ignoring any complaints about later versions), and FL was never able to get his foot in the door again.
I do always get the feeling the RF is an alternate reality (though it is chuckly that the Houdini Opening Book is advertised from ChessOK on the front page). Such as the recent thread that started: The TalkChess forum has always permitted public viewing of all discussions on that forum. Until today. Proceeding in that thread I find:Chris, Ed and RF posters have refuted exactly nothing. Just a great waste of computer network bandwidth and nothing else...
Must be a different rebuttal that the one I wrote?! Nowhere do I make such a comment, at the start or anywhere else. I mention copyright law for a couple of paragraphs in the first section (and a few more times later) because it formed a framework for various of the Panel discussions. The commenter seems not to address any of many other issues discussed in my "trashy rebuttal".Mr. Watkins trashy rebuttal starts by pretending that Rybka violates Fruit's copyright.
I was hoping for some substantive discussion of the points raised by the Riis series and its rebuttal(s), but I gave up trying to find such on the RF. I did find some more kooky claims:
I think the error is that of the writer, who seems to assume that my ASM annotation (of the Rybka eval) stood by itself; rather, it was meant to be read in conjunction with (say) the more verbose EVAL_COMP descriptions, more of as a check that said descriptions were indeed correct.And I have the impression Mark W. also is withholding us better annotated ASM code.
) your x1.8 to x1.9