Have thought about this line of reasoning as well. Goes a bit far don't you think?wgarvin wrote:One possibility is that the 3399 was chosen to hide the origin of the table data from casual scrutiny.
Imagine all the work involved, first getting familiar with the Fruit source code understanding the in's and out's before even dare to change a thing would take how much time? Then the supposed Mail-box to Bit-board conversion and all the testing involved, how much time? Then all the supposed obfuscations (100=3200) among them the PST's (import the calculated Fruit numbers into Rybka) on top of that adding an extra hiding element, the 3399 obfuscation. During the process adding 100 elo points. Loads of testing of course. All of that in 5½ months? I am counting from the release of Fruit 2.1 sources (17.06.2005) and the release of Rybka 1.0 beta (4.12.2005) The 5½ month being the best case scenario because nobody knows if Vas downloaded the Fruit sources on 17.6.2005 and nobody knows when Vas had his supposed eureka moment, "yes, this is good stuff, I am going to use Fruit as the base for my own engine".
Then there are quite a number of issues that unburden Rybka being based on Fruit.
1. For instance the minor promotions that is bugged in Rybka and not in Fruit, is there a reasonable explanation? Typo during the Mail-box to Bit-board conversion?
2. STRELKA. Aside from the usual ZORBIST table look at the Fruit sources first, it hardly has any tables except for generating the (ahem, in the meantime) notorious PST's and a table for the evaluation of king safety. Then look at Strelka, it has zillions of tables. How can this be explained?