TalkChess.com

Some days ago a young girl very affectionate to literature read a first , incomplete version of a novel of mine that will be published next year. She liked very much what she read, but she warned me that a full episode was almost exact equal to one wrote by another writer I have never read in my life. Sounds like a suspicious coincidence, but it has happened many times due to the immense corpus of literature already written.
Cannot we think the same happens with chess programming? Shouldn't even happen more as much it is a technical issue that follows certain necessary paths?
If hundreds of programmer follow same rules about so a narrow endeavor as it is to program a game with specific rules, cannot be coincidences of entire chunks of code and/ or behavior could happens?
I say this because again we are seeing posts claiming that a cloning operation has happened. I wonder if these guys are not pressing the point to much further and too much precosciously.

Fern

I agree with you on this one Fern. With hundreds of source codes available and hundreds of ideas on searching and evaluations it sounds very reasonable to find programs that play identical games even though theywere not clones in the first place and the authors may have never seen the other persons program.
Bill

Bill Rogers wrote:I agree with you on this one Fern. With hundreds of source codes available and hundreds of ideas on searching and evaluations it sounds very reasonable to find programs that play identical games even though theywere not clones in the first place and the authors may have never seen the other persons program.
Bill

You probably can't even find a single program that will play duplicate games, much less two different programs. The population of chess engines it tiny. The number of potential chess games is almost limitless... probability is probability here...

Nobody talked of duplicated games in its entirety, but of chunks of games, two moves, three moves....
I suppose that coincidence here is very possible.
There are hundreds of games with similar lines.
I suppose there are thousands of positions where due to its nature engines of some level will examine them equally.
Extreme case: a mate in two. If there is one or two paths to that, I assume every engine will show the same PV.

Of course I am not a programmer....
Fern