Matthias Gemuh wrote:
1) Crafty is not what I personally would pick for convertion (size of code).
Fair enough. But Fruit was no small program to convert either.
Matthias Gemuh wrote:
2) Convertion is so much work that many people would do it only if they want to go commercial.
Convertion has the advantage that you know how strong "your" engine will be, if you don't mess up something.
You mention 100%. Why 100% ? Does 90% not qualify for cloning ?
To be functional equivalent it must be 100% identical in its output. That's was the argument as I understood it from Fabian. Because if it's not copied code and it is not performing the same, then by what metric are you going to identify them as being the same?
Basicly all programs are 90% the same anyway, all using hashing, nullmove, iterated deepening, mobility eval etc...
I worry with you strict definition of things that there are no original engines left, we are all cloning eachother basicly, even Fruit is just a few percent original code by this strict definition.
So I think that makes not much sense. The problem for us, are the ones that take Fruit or Ippolit, change a few eval weights, add another extension and call it their own engine. These are the ones we should look out for.
Matthias Gemuh wrote:
BTW, when DanChess used substantial amounts of adapted Crafty eval, it was condemned as a clone
Regards,
Matthias.
Right there are various degrees. I don't know about this specific case but in general copying or reusing code is the key thing to avoid.