Albert Silver wrote:jdart wrote:It is an interesting point that, while not the primary motivation for Vas apparently, this model also prevents reverse engineering and piracy.
--Jon
A big 'perhaps' IMHO. There was no mention of remote Rybkas until Robbo came out. I thought the whole remote Rybka idea was simply to put an end to the rampant code-stealing while still being able to earn a living.
It might prevent piracy but passes "piracy"-like problems to the users.
The idea of remote Rybka is that strong players can use a stronger Rybka for say 1000 Euros a year. One really strong players can benefit from this, elo > 2700 for sure. People less than 2600 elo for example do not often have the technique and time management skills to convert a slight advantage (say a 0.50 rybka advantage).
The fatal flaw however is that the same players rated over 2700 are very paranoid about their analysis and would not trust a server to reply to their moves. Why not? There are at least 2 issues:
1. Any request to the analysis server and its results will be known by Vas and his team and thus their analysis would not be secret.
2. Hackers can figure out which positions are most topically analyzed on servers. Thus, the connection to the server has to implement SSL, which means that chessbase or a special rybka client has to be introduced.
The above may seem like paranoid arguments, but remember the players are over 2700 and their livelihood strongly depends on their analysis. I recall the story of a famous GM who was scared to leave behind his laptop in the hotel room because he was scared that his analysis will be known to other competitors (he actually did not care about the laptop's value).
I think a simpler idea would be to investigate ways to protect software such as self-modifying code which implements checksums at random locations in the code. There are related techniques which makes life really hard for a hacker.
