Rybka is better than top-20, so I did not claim that.
I was a half-pro ~10 years ago. I won the championship of my country. I wrote an M.Sc. thesis on evaluation tuning. If I'd use the standard approach that I already know, 6 months is a conservative estimate. The question is - what for?
I have not seen the Stockfish source, but my impression is that computer chess was going round in circles in the last 10 years, and it's still good old alpha-beta search with more refined heuristics.
The biggest value in studying computer chess for a programmer is IMO in seeing all the different performance optimization tricks.
Why did Google ask all those SEO companies to send e-mails to me? Why did Google give them a possibility to blackmail webmasters (disavow tool)? The Internet was not supposed to work this way. I should be able to link to whatever I want, and care only about the users, and not care about how competent or incompetent the search engine creators are, together with the SEO industry.
I have a website 5000best.com/tools with a ranking of web tools, and I received so far about 40-50 link removal requests. I rejected them all. First I answered to those people, later I stopped answering, because that's waste of my time.
The reason of all that nonsense seems to be this article:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notif...
and notifications in Google Webmaster Tools that tell people that spammy links point to their website, but do not tell them specifically which links Google does not like. I understand that Google uses link data mainly to estimate popularity of a website.
I don't understand why so large company, a global monopoly with so large revenue, and so much data gathered, can't figure out which sites are more popular than others without wasting webmasters' time. What's so difficult about that task? Why shift any work burden on website owners?
If this task is too difficult, maybe it's time to support the competition, or create a serious competition. Maybe Google does not deserve to be the largest search engine and get all the profits.
76k micro-genres seems much.
For my website http://5000best.com/movies/ I created 40 main genres using IMDb tags together with the 100 million ratings from the Netflix Prize data (I was 43rd in that competition).
Additionally, earlier I extracted and named 12 new genres (those ones on the right) from the Netflix ratings alone - I described the process here: http://arek-paterek.com/book/predict_sample.pdf
My website http://5000best.com/tools/ may be relevant. It lists mainly the most popular SaaS tools, but a few categories include widely used software components (non-free software only - no open source):
http://www.kongregate.com/games/random_strangers/511-game-bo...