What the computer chess community needs to decide

[bob]

What sense do you see in testing if the best program is playing with reduced strength so that it doesnt invite the cloners to steal.

I am not sure what you mean there. What program intentionally plays worse than it could play???

The author decided to throw R4 not with the optimal strength, because it would be stlen (decompiled) by your allies. I read that already bugs weaken a program. Now the cluster Rybka gets full strength. What's your comment?

A succinct one; "bullshit".

I see that I must move the schedule for my examins. It's too complex. I hope that the young or old silent readers could profit from the way you answered my questions. Just tell us how many of your students are interested in computerchess?

Not many, other that to follow how Crafty does...

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

What sense do you see in testing if the best program is playing with reduced strength so that it doesnt invite the cloners to steal.

I am not sure what you mean there. What program intentionally plays worse than it could play???

The author decided to throw R4 not with the optimal strength, because it would be stlen (decompiled) by your allies. I read that already bugs weaken a program. Now the cluster Rybka gets full strength. What's your comment?

A succinct one; "bullshit".

I see that I must move the schedule for my examins. It's too complex. I hope that the young or old silent readers could profit from the way you answered my questions. Just tell us how many of your students are interested in computerchess?

Not many, other that to follow how Crafty does...

Excellent answer Bob

[Michael Sherwin]

My take on ip* and _all_ of its cousins.

This thing is clearly reverse-engineered as a starting point. The code is unlike anything any human would ever produce. Even someone that has been doing optimization work for years would simply not write code that looks like that. IMHO, there is absolutely no doubt but that it started from reverse-engineering.

There is a major problem with this assumption that invalidates it completely as evidence until a claim by its secondary author(s) has been proved or disproved.

The claim by its secondary author(s) is that the original program was written by the original author in Russian_Chess_Language 'b' code. If this is true then a likely assumption is that the 'b' compiler outputs 'C' code that would look like it came from reverse engineering.

Both assumptions are just as invalid until the prior claim has been dealt with. However, until it has been dealt with one is more correct to take the word of the secondary authors and proceed as though the 'C' source came from a higher level compiler. If this is not acceptable then one should address the previous claim adequately before hand to avoid publishing a potentially erroneous and damaging conclusion as undeniable fact.

[rlsuth]

Imagine if car manufacturers never learned anything from other car manufacturers? It's just not plausible to think that chess engine authors wont try to learn from other chess program authors. As long as it's only the idea they learn and then create a unique implementation, I have no problem with it. If their program is stronger for it, that's good.

[michiguel]

Imagine if car manufacturers never learned anything from other car manufacturers? It's just not plausible to think that chess engine authors wont try to learn from other chess program authors. As long as it's only the idea they learn and then create a unique implementation, I have no problem with it. If their program is stronger for it, that's good.

Do you realize that learn is not the same as copy?

Miguel

[rlsuth]

Imagine if car manufacturers never learned anything from other car manufacturers? It's just not plausible to think that chess engine authors wont try to learn from other chess program authors. As long as it's only the idea they learn and then create a unique implementation, I have no problem with it. If their program is stronger for it, that's good.

Do you realize that learn is not the same as copy?

Miguel

Do you realize that I'm talking about learning and not copying?


Learning and copying are not necessarily mutually exclusive anyway. In the analogy of a car, other manufacturers learned what worked and then copied the idea.

You might be getting confused with copying and plagiarism though. In the case of Rybka, Vas said he read through the Fruit code and then coded his own program based on what he learned. That's not plagiarism, but it is copying, and learning.