Cry Me A River - Chess Non-Profits Cry Foul over Fat Fritz 2 Whilst they Copied the Puzzle Rush Design

 Lichess, Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero are non-profits who develop chess software out of the goodness of their heart until someone comes along who does it better. Then their altruism is replaced by self-righteous rage.

This story begins way back in the long and distant past when I was an undergraduate at Imperial College, the internet was still a new thing and most people on the planet didn't know what it was let alone use it. As a university student, it was like being a pioneering explorer. I concerned myself with exploring the chess universe. This consisted of the ICS (Internet Chess Server) and various chess bulletin boards.

Albert Silver was not well known at this time but was a man with a vision. He invented a graphical interface for online chess for a chess software company called Convetka Ltd who were creators of Chess Assistant and became immortalized in the process as being one of the pioneers of online chess for his innovative graphical user interface.

Convekta Ltd was not limited to Chess Assistant but also invented CT-Art the world's most successful chess puzzle trainer at that time. Albert Silver was the interface designer for a time for that company.

Albert Silver later became editor of ChessBase and a seriously competent chess photographer. I meanwhile invented what became known as Puzzle Rush and the world's most popular grassroots community Chess Club Live.

Chess.com received the code for my puzzle game and a video tutorial of how it worked they set about cloning it and eventually came out with Puzzle Rush a stylish bastardized version of my app. In the next months and years that followed Lichess (Puzzle Storm) and Stockfish (working with Play Magnus on Tactics Frenzy) would also copy the design to create their own versions of the Puzzle Rush chess feature that chess.com had taken without permission, attribution, or credit.

Meanwhile while all the Puzzle Rush drama was being played out the Fat Fritz project became Albert Silver's new foray into the world of chess neural nets and reinforcement learning systems. His unique idea in Fat Fritz 2 was to use human master games to train the neural network and to increase the neural network from the widely accepted viable maximum of 256 neurons to 512 neurons. 

Albert Silver had not only shown that the Alpha Zero approach was not the only way to train a chess neural network but he has expanded the size of the neural network to double what was accepted as viable. He did all this and published his work and then sought permission from the Leela Chess Zero team to use the GPL for a commercial venture with ChessBase to create the Fat Fritz 2. The permission was granted and ChessBase published the Fat Fritz 2 product.

The very same people who had flaunted their versions of my copied chess puzzle app were now turning on Albert Silver to say he had ripped off their work. It is hard to understand the level of hypocrisy required to reach this position when you gleefully copy someone's work in one arena and blame someone (Albert Silver) for legally using the GPL available for anyone to use. Albert Silver had worked tirelessly investing his own money in pursuing a vision he had and taken all that risk and managed somehow against all the odds to create chess magic. He published his work for others to follow in his footsteps and made his product available commercially. Thank you Albert Silver for your persistence and genius.

I think it is time Lichess, Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero cried a river.