OpenChess

Dave Mitchell wrote:
Since his income is tied to Rybka, Vas is also highly motivated to work on his engine, and be sure every part of it (opening book, etc), is taken care of.

Playing devil's advocate, updates to Rybka are rare, and that includes bug fixes. Rybka's endgame abilities could be improved; the engine shouldn't need to rely on tablebases. Also I understand that the next release of Rybka will be sometime in the fall of 2011, and Mr. Rajlich has stated on the website that he willbe moving on to projects besides Rybka in the future.

You can draw your own conclusions from this.

Tom Barrister wrote:...the engine shouldn't need to rely on tablebases.

just another unwarranted simple-minded phantasm...

Simply figure that the 5-men tablebases are part of the engine!

If we accept that Vas's income is closely tied to Rybka, then we have to accept that it's a truth that cuts both ways. If sales have slumped because there are now free engines of approximately equal strength to Rybka, then Vas may well need to move on to something else. (I have no idea if this is the case).

If Vas has lost interest in working on Rybka, whatever the reason, that would be a big loss to CC fans.

Dave Mitchell wrote:If we accept that Vas's income is closely tied to Rybka, then we have to accept that it's a truth that cuts both ways. If sales have slumped because there are now free engines of approximately equal strength to Rybka, then Vas may well need to move on to something else. (I have no idea if this is the case).

If Vas has lost interest in working on Rybka, whatever the reason, that would be a big loss to CC fans.

To me this equals good news

If we accept that Vas's income is closely tied to Rybka, then we have to accept that it's a truth that cuts both ways. If sales have slumped because there are now free engines of approximately equal strength to Rybka, then Vas may well need to move on to something else. (I have no idea if this is the case).

If Vas has lost interest in working on Rybka, whatever the reason, that would be a big loss to CC fans.

In previous notes, VR has implied that he doesn't consider money issues as central to his development of Rybka. The IEEE Spectrum Game Boy article says:

The company pays Rajlich a salary, freeing him to spend his days refining the next iteration of Rybka.

”I don’t anticipate that I’ll ever have to make a decision based on money,” he says. ”If you’re a software developer, and you get to a certain age, you have to decide what you want to do, and do it.”

My own guess is that he loses interest, it will be because of the "more standard" issues the effort to implement new ideas seems to large, or that they are not likely to improve the engine much. Recall that he out-sourced the re-writing of the eval to LK, and appears more interested in the cluster version. There have been many others who disappear after 5 or maybe 10 years, and some of these then come back later. Burn-out is as common as in other jobs. Some have quit when "at the top", so it's not like VR pursuing other interests would be unprecedented.