Sorry, but you had better read everything again. _I_ have not made any accusations. I'm interested in what has been presented so far, and I have responded to a ton of nonsensical suggestions that identical segments of code are common in chess programs that are developed "independently". That is, and always has been, a crock. I have commented that the evidence is far from trivial now as well.chrisw wrote:It is absolutely not up to those who believe in good motive and process rather than evil before proven otherwise, or in innocence before guilt before it is proven otherwise to be doing experiments for you.bob wrote:It doesn't say a thing that is not new. We are not talking about copying arrays of numbers that teach a program how to count the squares in some order. Or a set of masks used to extract a particular rank or file contents.
We are talking about _executable_ code. Constants would come into play for subjective things like evaluation weights, but at the moment the comparison has been on comparing executable lines of code.
I have made this offer previously. Crafty is a bitboard program. Choose any bitboard program you want, and lets compare the classic example that everyone here is harping on, that being move ordering, since we all use pretty much the same ordering ideas. I claim you will find no blocks of code that are common with another bitboard program. I doubt you will find any single lines of code that are in common, except for things like for (i=0;i<64;i++) or perhaps an occasional i++ and all of that is extremely rare in my program anyway.
Nobody has taken me up on this, but they keep repeating over and over, if you use similar approaches, you will have similar code. That is incorrect. It would be just as probable to ask two different authors to write a one-page explanation of some well-known idea (reductions for example) and then get an explanation that has many word-for-word commonalities. It won't happen.
But nobody wants to try the test because that will offer real insight into the discussion and that is not what many want.
Come up with some convincing evidence and it will be tested and questioned as you would expect.
The onus is on you. You are the accuser.
BTW I do sort of "get it." Nobody is going to test a hypothesis that might shed light on a topic they know nothing about, and which also might lend additional support to my statement about duplicate code and the probability of such happening being vanishingly small. So you'd rather just accept that it can happen and move on. If rybka and fruit can be reasonably expected to have common blocks of code, then so can crafty and gnuchess, or crafty and glaurung, or crafty and fruit, or crafty and arasan. Surely you don't want to change this to "it is highly likely fruit and rybka have duplicate code that happened purely by chance, but crafty has no code in common with anyone else at all.?" It is either likely or it is not. I and a great number of other people around the world say it is not. I was interested in submarine fiction a while back, and read a stack of books by everyone from Joe Buff, to Patrick Robinson, to even Tom Clancy, and some others I am forgetting. And even in that tightly defined area of fiction there were no similarities in the stories, much less in the text they produced. Those are much smaller works than a chess program.