David Levy asked for opinions

[Rolf]

So, one of the two following statements is true:

(1) Vas lied when he said no part of Fruit is in Rybka, but that Strelka was an exact clone of Rybka 1, since there are similarities between strelka and fruit. SO if strelka is a clone of Rybka, and it has "fruity code" something is wrong.

(2) Vas lied when he said Strelka is an exact clone of Rybka. Which for us is irrelevant since we have not been comparing strelka to Rybka in quite a while since we have been comparing the R1 beta binary to Fruit.

Either way...

No, it's all wrong with your quotes.
Vas never said that no parts of Fruit were in Rybka. To the contrary he said I took many things! Among them public domain stuff and such. So, if you want there is a philosophical contradiction when he says he wrote the whole code by himself. But you are the programmer not me.

Vas never said that Strelka is a Fruit clone. Vas never said that Strelka is an exact Rybka clone either. He claimed something like this is my program and he wanted to market it. If he had meant it is my own as an exact copy a marketing would be silly because people already had his program. This is also sort of irony which Vas is using in his speech. (The same with his reply to David "I dont really know what to say"... This is why you, Bob and others like Keith Hyams believe, Vas is saying nothing at all - in a juridical sense!) I am really eager to receive the reports how the judge in Fabien's case will react on such verbal quotings.

I cant explain as a lay what your findings about Rybka 1 beta could mean, cloning or GPL, but I doubt that it has any impact on R 3 & 4.

I would really not expect that you in such a tribunal will outsort a World Champion collegie of undoubtable expertise and replacing him by such anons Norman and Lenin. I trust David that he isnt such a fool to cooperate with anons, although he also believes in making love to a computer in future. Bob, you certainly wouldnt do this, no?!

[Roger Brown]

No, it's all wrong with your quotes.
Vas never said that no parts of Fruit were in Rybka. To the contrary he said I took many things! Among them public domain stuff and such. So, if you want there is a philosophical contradiction when he says he wrote the whole code by himself. But you are the programmer not me.

Vas never said that Strelka is a Fruit clone. Vas never said that Strelka is an exact Rybka clone either. He claimed something like this is my program and he wanted to market it. If he had meant it is my own as an exact copy a marketing would be silly because people already had his program. This is also sort of irony which Vas is using in his speech. (The same with his reply to David "I dont really know what to say"... This is why you, Bob and others like Keith Hyams believe, Vas is saying nothing at all - in a juridical sense!) I am really eager to receive the reports how the judge in Fabien's case will react on such verbal quotings.

I cant explain as a lay what your findings about Rybka 1 beta could mean, cloning or GPL, but I doubt that it has any impact on R 3 & 4.

I would really not expect that you in such a tribunal will outsort a World Champion collegie of undoubtable expertise and replacing him by such anons Norman and Lenin. I trust David that he isnt such a fool to cooperate with anons, although he also believes in making love to a computer in future. Bob, you certainly wouldnt do this, no?!

Hello Rolf,

I am going to use this as a test of your impervious nature - you resist the penetration of truth. Explain the text below without spamming or I will delete it.

Later.

By Vasik Rajlich Date 2008-01-11 12:26

I’ve taken a look this morning at the Strelka 2.0 sources. The picture is quite clear.

Vast sections of these sources started their life as a decompiled Rybka 1.0. The traces of this are everywhere. The board representation is identical, and all sorts of absolutely unique Rybka code methods, bitboard tricks and even exact data tables are used throughout. Significant portions of the search and evaluation logic are not fully disassembled – the author has left in hardcoded constants and used generic names (such as “PawnStruScore0″ & “PawnStruScore1″, “PassedPawnValue0″ through “PassedPawnValue7″, etc) which show that he hasn’t yet fully understood what is happening.

In some cases, these traces do also extend beyond the inner search and evaluation kernel. For instance, Rybka and Strelka are the only engines which I know about which don’t report “seldepth” and “hashfull”. Rybka’s UCI strings are used throughout.

The author did at first make attempts to hide the Rybka origins, for example by masking the table values in earlier Strelka versions. He also made significant attempts to improve the program. The attempts at improvement are not very original, but they are everywhere. They include PV collection, null verification (and in fact changes to the null implementation itself), some endgame drawishness heuristics, a handful of new evaluation term, a new approach to blending between opening and endgame eval terms, and so on. They also do include various structural changes, such as knight underpromotions, on-the-fly calculations of many tables, the setting of piece-square table values, etc. These changes are extensive and no doubt lead to differences in playing style and perhaps a useful engine for users to have, but they do not change the illegality of the code base.

In light of the above, I am claiming Strelka 2.0 as my own and will release it in the next few days under my own name. The name of the author with the pen name “Osipov” will be included if he comes forward with hiw own real name, otherwise an anonymous contribution will be noted. The contributions of Igor Korshunov will also be confirmed and noted if appropriate. All usage permissions will be granted with this release.

I do not see obvious signs of other code usage, but perhaps this deserves a closer look. Some of the transplanted ideas, such as the null verification search, are rather naive implementations of the approach in Fruit/Toga, although my first impression is that that code itself is original. The Winboard parser from Beowolf which was added to Strelka 1.0 seems to have been completely removed. If someone else does find other signs of code theft, please get in touch with me and I will give proper credit in the upcoming release.

If someone has suggestions about an appropriate license, and in particular the pros and cons of the GPL for a chess engine and for this unusual scenario, or if someone would be willing to help in preparing this code and license for release, please also get in touch with me.

As this code is two years and several hundred Elo old, I am not going to launch any major action. However, ‘Osipov’ has already threatened to repeat the procedure with Rybka 2.3.2a. (He did this after I declined to grant him rights to commercialize Strelka.) If this situation does repeat with a newer Rybka version, I will not just stand and watch any more. In the meantime, if someone has information about ‘Osipov’, please get in touch with me.

[Rolf]

No, it's all wrong with your quotes.
Vas never said that no parts of Fruit were in Rybka. To the contrary he said I took many things! Among them public domain stuff and such. So, if you want there is a philosophical contradiction when he says he wrote the whole code by himself. But you are the programmer not me.

Vas never said that Strelka is a Fruit clone. Vas never said that Strelka is an exact Rybka clone either. He claimed something like this is my program and he wanted to market it. If he had meant it is my own as an exact copy a marketing would be silly because people already had his program. This is also sort of irony which Vas is using in his speech. (The same with his reply to David "I dont really know what to say"... This is why you, Bob and others like Keith Hyams believe, Vas is saying nothing at all - in a juridical sense!) I am really eager to receive the reports how the judge in Fabien's case will react on such verbal quotings.

I cant explain as a lay what your findings about Rybka 1 beta could mean, cloning or GPL, but I doubt that it has any impact on R 3 & 4.

I would really not expect that you in such a tribunal will outsort a World Champion collegie of undoubtable expertise and replacing him by such anons Norman and Lenin. I trust David that he isnt such a fool to cooperate with anons, although he also believes in making love to a computer in future. Bob, you certainly wouldnt do this, no?!

Hello Rolf,

I am going to use this as a test of your impervious nature - you resist the penetration of truth. Explain the text below without spamming or I will delete it.

Later.

By Vasik Rajlich Date 2008-01-11 12:26

I’ve taken a look this morning at the Strelka 2.0 sources. The picture is quite clear.

Vast sections of these sources started their life as a decompiled Rybka 1.0. The traces of this are everywhere. The board representation is identical, and all sorts of absolutely unique Rybka code methods, bitboard tricks and even exact data tables are used throughout. Significant portions of the search and evaluation logic are not fully disassembled – the author has left in hardcoded constants and used generic names (such as “PawnStruScore0″ & “PawnStruScore1″, “PassedPawnValue0″ through “PassedPawnValue7″, etc) which show that he hasn’t yet fully understood what is happening.

In some cases, these traces do also extend beyond the inner search and evaluation kernel. For instance, Rybka and Strelka are the only engines which I know about which don’t report “seldepth” and “hashfull”. Rybka’s UCI strings are used throughout.

The author did at first make attempts to hide the Rybka origins, for example by masking the table values in earlier Strelka versions. He also made significant attempts to improve the program. The attempts at improvement are not very original, but they are everywhere. They include PV collection, null verification (and in fact changes to the null implementation itself), some endgame drawishness heuristics, a handful of new evaluation term, a new approach to blending between opening and endgame eval terms, and so on. They also do include various structural changes, such as knight underpromotions, on-the-fly calculations of many tables, the setting of piece-square table values, etc. These changes are extensive and no doubt lead to differences in playing style and perhaps a useful engine for users to have, but they do not change the illegality of the code base.

In light of the above, I am claiming Strelka 2.0 as my own and will release it in the next few days under my own name. The name of the author with the pen name “Osipov” will be included if he comes forward with hiw own real name, otherwise an anonymous contribution will be noted. The contributions of Igor Korshunov will also be confirmed and noted if appropriate. All usage permissions will be granted with this release.

I do not see obvious signs of other code usage, but perhaps this deserves a closer look. Some of the transplanted ideas, such as the null verification search, are rather naive implementations of the approach in Fruit/Toga, although my first impression is that that code itself is original. The Winboard parser from Beowolf which was added to Strelka 1.0 seems to have been completely removed. If someone else does find other signs of code theft, please get in touch with me and I will give proper credit in the upcoming release.

If someone has suggestions about an appropriate license, and in particular the pros and cons of the GPL for a chess engine and for this unusual scenario, or if someone would be willing to help in preparing this code and license for release, please also get in touch with me.

As this code is two years and several hundred Elo old, I am not going to launch any major action. However, ‘Osipov’ has already threatened to repeat the procedure with Rybka 2.3.2a. (He did this after I declined to grant him rights to commercialize Strelka.) If this situation does repeat with a newer Rybka version, I will not just stand and watch any more. In the meantime, if someone has information about ‘Osipov’, please get in touch with me.

I dont know what you really expect me to explain. Perhaps this. In the red-lighted part of my answer to Bob (red-lighted by you) I was referring to the (2) from Bob.

I quote:

(2) Vas lied when he said Strelka is an exact clone of Rybka.

My comment is still correct, for all because I had understood Bob as if he were talking about Strelka 1. Now I aam a bit surprised about Strelka 2, also here I cannot interprete Vas as if he had said that Strelka 2 is an exact copy of Rybka, since Vas himself explained the differences in the code of Strelka. So I understand his statement that Strelka is coming, developed or derived from his Rybka, but for me as non-programmer he didnt say exact copy because then the different changes could not exist.


Does this answer your question?

Perhaps I should add that the chain is

Fruit .... goes to Strelka 1 ..... to Rybka 1 beta

it was never talked about something like

Fruit .... Strelka 2 ..... Rybka 3

Hope this helps. Regards

[Roger Brown]

Hope this helps. Regards

Yes it does actually.

It tells me how to deal with you when next you post long strings of verbiage going absolutely nowhere.

Later.