WCCC 2011 - Junior is the 2011 World Champion

[Don]

No quotes from me?

as you know...searching this forum is a tedious exercise.
i stopped after searching the 3 above, easily obtaining ample results, and fairly quickly realized i had a veritable 'smorgasbord' of examples using Bob alone.

that being said, i do admit,
searching your posts (and Graham as well) would most certainly present a bevy of crude responses...

and it might be very interesting to compare your 'style' of disrespecting those you don't agree with against the 3 authors mentioned above.

very sad...this unfortunate behavior has clearly become the de-facto standard here (the CCC),
program authors simply 'shit' on each other (and other programs) in a pitiful and vain attempt to garner recognition for themselves and their own programs.

I agree it's a problem, but isn't it always the case that those who complain the loudest often are the worst offenders? We have all done this including you, but suddenly you feel that you are qualified to rebuke us for our bad behavior as if you are poster child for warmth, compassion and respect.

saying 'yeah, but he does it too'...doesn't excuse, or does it?
sad to see you recourse is an attack...

unfortunately, whether it's me or someone else that points it out...
it is what it is.

Ok, you are right. I will tone down my attacks. Thank you for correcting me on this.

[hgm]

Actually this guy gives me an inferiority complex!

get your program up the level of Crafty, Stockfish, and/or Komodo, and next time (i promise), i will certainly include you in my search for disrespectful author quotes.

But it is already an order of magnitude above their level, in terms of Elo / character... And Fairy-Max beats all of them 14-2 anyway!
(Except perhaps Komodo; that could be 13-3.)

[FWCC]

Most assuredly Junior IS NOT the strongest Non-Human chess playing entity on the planet.There should be a UNIVERSAL Tour arranged where everything plays.


FWCC

[fern]

In fact, if you allow me to say it and give me some credit, I am the one that has maintained here a decent coat of good manners. I have been treated of almost everything, only excluding to be a serial killer, but I do not say much about it. I read, I enjoy well made sentences, I smile and I answer to practice my precarious English.

But in fact I do not deserve not even that humble piece of credit because of the scanty importance I give to this place and his sayings. For me it is just like a children room so these days I do not come here but for my sense of duty as a moderator, because I must see what's going on.

People becomes children when they lose every sense of perspective and proportion. So a day comes when a battle about -of all things- chess engines becomes something as serious as the current discussion to avoid European Zone failure.

Of course I do not produce chess engines, that facilitates my detachment, but Not even to be author of those piece of software gives extra load to enlarge out of proportion this affair, ANY affair: I am writer and I do not give much importance at what I do, what they say, how much the take from me. As a 4 times best seller I have seen several times my books pirated and sold in front of my nose, in the street, like happens in china con Microsoft stuff. I only consider a serious matter anything associated to my daughters. It is a good recipe to keep you sane.
The rest can go to hell.

my best
Fern

[marcelk]

We explicitly voted to allow nalimov EGTB code. It is the sort of code where for any input, there is exactly one output, no variability whatsoever. Most of a chess engine does NOT fit in that category. Certainly nothing to do with search or evaluation..

As I understand this rationalization is your contribution. Historically it would be nice to understand if it was expressed that way during that first player's meeting? I looked through the rules and I can't find this written in the ICGA rules or journals discussing the rules. Maybe I looked in the wrong place. Either way, those player meeting rules are not written in stone either: It is possible that a current player thinks different from a past player. Some go as far suggesting the past player's opinion is irrelevant. I wouldn't take it that far myself if I were a player.

The historian looking back might be tempted to conclude "The Nalimovs got allowed because everybody had them included already when the issue was brought up, everybody was excited about them and it was way too much work to rewrite it all by themselves (imagine getting that nasty en-passant rule right in retrograde analyses, or compressing while still allowing reasonable random access), so they conveniently excused themselves because Nalimov didn't seem to object either".

He might also think "That one-input one-output because-it-is-neutral is a kind of a weird justification because why then did everyone at more or less the same moment stopped using Ken's databases and started using the Nalimovs, which are functionally entirely equivalent. Maybe because Ken's CD-ROMs can't easily be probed from within the search tree and that was a perceived big advantage. That is funny: one-input one-output but orders-more-faster is suddenly not exactly neutral anymore. Wonder why they would allow that while the discovery that one was illegally using the number 0.0 in a time-related function was a big deal a few years later..."

This hypothetical historian might then shrug his shoulders and instead study the ways of the banned programmers who were much closer to solving chess at the time but outcast by their peers.

I'm not an expert but I've heard of a program called 'bayeselo', many rating lists seem to use it.

What is the INPUT for BayesElo? (BTW I use it daily in my cluster testing). The answer is "raw PGN". From WHAT games? Under WHAT conditions? Under WHAT time controls? Etc. Too easy to manipulate.

Conditions set by the TD, or prior winners, whatever, its implementation is solvable.

You are using a recursive process. You don't let them compete until they show a significant improvement. They can't show a significant improvement if they can't compete. How, exactly, does that seem like a rational process???

I think that bear is dead. It is possible to play vetting games before the tournament to show added value over what you started out with. A bit how it was done for one of the programs in the olympiad this year. (One program was asked to play games before being allowed in its tournament, and lo and behold, it turned out to be possible to do so without creating a logical fallacy or infinite recursion.).

[marcelk]

Doping is NOT "harmful to your health".
...
Generally means an excess of red blood cells, which would occur naturally if you trained at high altitude for an extended period of time. If you mean HGH and/or steroids, they are certainly bad, but I have not seen those called "doping" in the past...

You must thoroughly hate the present then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_per ... s_in_sport

The use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport is commonly referred to by the term "doping", particularly by those organizations that regulate competitions.
...
4 Benzedrine
5 Anabolic steroids
5.1 1988 Seoul Olympics
5.2 The case of East Germany
5.3 Modern times
5.4 NFL

Only in CCC can a thread congratulating a chess programmer for winning the world title end up arguing about blood doping...

[wims]

I dont know if this has been posted or not, as I dont want to read page after page after page after page about cloning. Every single thread on this site for the last year++ have turned into a debate about cloning and i have grown quite tired of it.

Anyways, a chess video commentator on youtube, Kingscrusher, have featured one of the games from the WCCC between Junior and Woodpusher on his youtube channel, you can check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcgAHkq7v-A

[Don]

Doping is NOT "harmful to your health".
...
Generally means an excess of red blood cells, which would occur naturally if you trained at high altitude for an extended period of time. If you mean HGH and/or steroids, they are certainly bad, but I have not seen those called "doping" in the past...

You must thoroughly hate the present then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_per ... s_in_sport

The use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport is commonly referred to by the term "doping", particularly by those organizations that regulate competitions.
...
4 Benzedrine
5 Anabolic steroids
5.1 1988 Seoul Olympics
5.2 The case of East Germany
5.3 Modern times
5.4 NFL

Only in CCC can a thread congratulating a chess programmer for winning the world title end up arguing about blood doping...

I don't really want to go on and on and on about letting clones compete. There is obviously a difference of opinion and I happen to believe that the point of view of letting the clones compete is not a character flaw even if I have implied that in the past. But I definitely think it is not well thought out and that it's a truly bad idea. Let me explain.

I am clearly not afraid of competition. In fact I believe that one of either Rybka, Fruit or Houdini should be allowed to compete to represent the "Fruit" name. However if you do the math you see that what you are proposing is definitely UNFAIR to any of the contestant at a tournament. I'm going to exaggerate to make the point clear, but the principle applies if even 2 clones are at a tournament. Here is the scenario:

1. The tournaments are all opened up to any program by any author (we can quibble about how different the program must be, but presumably a number of programs based on the same code with some degree of modifications are considered legal.)

2. We have a tournament with 64 players, 5 original program and 59 derivatives of Ivanhoe.

3. To make the math easier, let's assume that all programs have an equal chance of winning the tournament. Even though that won't be the case the principle is exactly the same.

4. The odds that one of the original programs will win the tournament is 5/64 or 7.8 percent.

5. The odds that one of the 5 original programs will win the tournament is 59 / 64 or 92.2 percent.

Now, let's look at the points of views of the players. First the cloners. The barrier of entry has been lowered, you don't have to have any programming skill to have a top class entrant at one of these tournaments, and thus this is a great thing! Right?

Now the point of view of the original program authors is that they now have to compete against multiple versions of the same program. It's almost like a fix, the odds have been stacked so that it's almost a sure thing that some version of the "Ivanhoe" program will win the tournament or whatever top open source program is at the tournament.

Now another point of view is that the "Ivanhoe's" also have the same deal, they have to compete against each other and any individual program has no better odds than any other program so you say this is completely fair. But then I ask you this, who actually deserves to win this tournament, the guy that took the Ivanhoe sources and change the author name and the program name or the guy that has been in computer chess for many years and took several years to get his program up to a high level?

So what you have basically done is turned the program into a program contest instead of a programming contest, but you artificially attach author names anyone, even though it's far less relevant. It's a shadow of what it should be.

Now you will probably protest and say that it's not enough to just come with an identical copy of Ivahoe, that you must demonstrate 200 ELO of improvement over the program that you copy, admit that you copied it, etc ..... but if you do that you are just admitting that the concept is broken. Also you are opening the door to all sorts of disputes about how much the ELO gain should be, how it should be measured, which rating list, and almost certainly there will accusation of cheating on the rating list. The rating organizations are loosely organized and so it would be possible in the case of a very close call for some last minute results to suddenly make a program eligible to complete. Even if that never happens any suspicious last minute updates to a list will bring accusations and controversy. So you have the ridiculous situation that the originality of a program is measured by it's ELO, not it's actual code.

I would further point out that none of the proposed changes would have changed anything that has happened because the authors of the cloned program have not admitted any wrongdoing. So we STILL have the problem of detecting clones because it's a certain thing that if someone takes Ivanhoe and adds 100 ELO they are not going to share credit, they are going to try to pass the program off as being their own original creation. So what you have effectively done is to just add a great deal of red-tape and regulation to the process. You have added to the burden of the ICGA because now even more things must be regulated and checked and you have minimized (and effectively punished) original programmers.

Another thing that you have not addressed is the GPL issue. You are proposing that it be allowed to take a GPL program, modify it and then compete with it. So you have another situation, you either thumb your nose at the GPL or to be correct you have to allow authors to compete any number of times. So if Komodo at some future becomes open source and every program ends up based on it, then I automatically win the tournament regardless of who is running the code! So you have to devise a system of minimizing the credit to the original programmers or just make this a pure program contest.

Now if you make this a program contest, then the authors should not be given any credit because this is no longer about people, it's about software. But you can be sure that programmers will try to take credit if the program that happens to have their name on it wins the tournament.

There are so many cans of worms and flaws in this that I have to believe that it hasn't been thought through well. I suggest that you have a separate and strict anything goes tournament if that is what you see as being desirable. Each human representative is free to bring as many programs as he desires and there need be no rules requiring you to have even written a line of code.

In fact something like this has already been done. I don't know the current situation of the icc chess server, but many years ago you could log on and about 50 different Crafty clones would be on or near the top of the lists, all run by different people. It's difficult to attach any meaning to this, and it would be the same in such a tournament as envisioned by you as ideal. I agree that the result of these tournaments is not very valid statistically anyway, however it would mean even less if some more or less stock version of some starting reference program always won.

Here is more irony. In this scenario I could take Houdini, reverse engineer it, and have the same chances as Houdini to win the tournament without a single original line of code. Since I reverse engineered it the source would superficially look different and with the highly relaxed rules you propose nobody could question it. And I could always use the noble statement that "I am standing on the shoulders of giants" if someone noticed the functional similarities.

Even if, as you say, there would some restrictions I have to believe this would just be the first step towards lowering the standards even further - because it would break a taboo. There would come a point where you literally COULD come to a tournament with nothing more than a name and author change. That would happen because the cycle would repeat again, someone would try to represent a program as original that was even LESS different that Rybka was but the lowering of standards would make it even more difficult to say this was wrong. It's rather funny that a proposal is in place that does not address what the actual situation was but it will impact how lying and cheating will be handled in the future. Or perhaps the point is that by making it legal to do this, people won't lie and cheat as much? We could solve all crime this way by just making it legal.

[Milos]

Here is more irony. In this scenario I could take Houdini, reverse engineer it, and have the same chances as Houdini to win the tournament without a single original line of code. Since I reverse engineered it the source would superficially look different and with the highly relaxed rules you propose nobody could question it. And I could always use the noble statement that "I am standing on the shoulders of giants" if someone noticed the functional similarities.

Stop the BS. For you and 90% or other "original" authors, taking a 3000 elo program reverse engineering it and making a new program (without any change) that is working is an impossible task. Making a RE program that is 3000 elo strong is even more impossible.
Stop talking about things that you don't have a clue about.
Reverse engineering and making a new program that is equally strong or stronger is much harder than writing an original 3000 elo program.
If you thinks it's so easy just try it.
I'm really sick of you spreading that nonsense over and over again.

[mar]

Reverse engineering and making a new program that is equally strong or stronger is much harder than writing an original 3000 elo program.

RE a program is very hard but certainly not as hard as writing a 3000 elo program from scratch. I haven't done any of the above, just some minor RE not regarding a chess engine.
Have you? Sounds like you are an expert and could compare Ever heard of IDA? Hexrays?