TalkChess.com

jdart wrote:If you want to work on app servers, you can join an existing project like Tomcat. If you want to work on compilers, you can join the GCC project and contribute improvements. If you want to work on operating systems you can become a Linux comitter. I don't think anyone would consider you a second-rate programmer, or not an innovative one, because you were doing this on an existing foundation, vs. starting your own compiler project (for example). In fact these projects wouldn't have existed and advanced without a lot of dedicated contributors.

(Most commercial closed-sourced development is also like this. If you are in an early stage startup, you get to code stuff from scratch. But otherwise, you are probably fixing bugs and adding features to something that's existing, or at least building an add on of some sort that has to work with existing software).

So why is computer chess different?

--Jon

This ground has been covered over and over, but I'll remind you that we are talking about plagiarism. The FSF which STANDS for freedom strongly disagrees with you on this. It's not ok to plagiarize. Moral society has some bounds on what is acceptable and this is not.

Ed's arguments are just another way to justify plagiarism and dishonesty - by denying what is actually happening and trying to make it seems modern and new - but theft is very old and ancient.

If you want to work on an EXISTING project and share credit and be constrained by their rules, then there is nothing wrong with that. That's not what we are talking about here and nobody is going to care if some chess project is started where everyone is free to contribute. I'm all for that.

There are hundreds if not thousands of chess programs and this is not like compiler technology where there are only 3 or 4 compilers getting 99% of the usage. The compiler is a tool that we all need and there is no real need for incredible diversity or interesting variations. In fact the goal for compilers is that they should all just work the same. It makes huge sense to work together on projects like that.

Ed is suggesting that it's just plain ok to take anybody's program as a starting point and start your own chess project from that, WITHOUT any regard to the rule of law or the licensing or the feelings of those who did not want their own work plagiarized.

If I came into your home and starting taking stuff out and then attacked you for not being willing to share wouldn't you fight back? I cannot understand the lack of compassion that Ed and others have for Fabien and his hard work and a complete disregard for how HE feels about it. To me this is the height of immorality - it's rape. Now you and others are arguing that everyone should just be entitled to rape and that it's just the way of the world and just be declared acceptable.

I think you're setting up the problem in a manner not consistent with reality. You will, that is, divide the world in two: those who want to comply with the rules and who does not want. Of course, things are really different.

The publication of source code "Ippolit / Rybka / Fruit" has made ​​available to all, these ideas and this code. As it is human, ALL (some more, some less) have taken advantage of. Some people took some portion of code, those who took the entire program and those who took the ideas and methods. In practice, everyone has got something.
I heard someone say: "I have taken only the ideas!". As if to copy the ideas, it is nobler to copy the code... These are subtleties by priest! They play out of tune.

Many noble programs, have made a sudden leap in quality after the publication of Ippolit. ELO + 300, ELO + 400... WOW! Coincidence?
This could not be avoided, the source code was there, nice and helpful. The trouble is that there is no going back. Now, nothing is like before.

Mr. Muller often cites the paradigm of the marathon. Some people prefer to run honestly and those who want to cheat by taking the bus. I believe that now there are many "fake honest" that have wheels hidden in his shoes. They simulate to run honestly and despise those who take the bus. This way everyone looks at the "apparent cheaters" and no one can see their "Ippo-wheels"...

I do not know which solution can be adopted, but I'm sure you can not pretend that nothing has happened...

Don wrote: Ed is suggesting that it's just plain ok to take anybody's program as a starting point and start your own chess project from that, WITHOUT any regard to the rule of law or the licensing or the feelings of those who did not want their own work plagiarized.

I pointed out (above) that this is not allowed and I don't support it. But I think Ed's larger point was that incremental evolution from a very strong starting point is becoming the norm and if that starting point is legitimate, and the derivation from it is clear and legal, then that is a good way to advance the state of the art IMO.

Absolutely correct. We even can add that heuristics about everything appertaining to intellectual creation will change and with it the notion of personal identity.
The old heuristics are falling apart. The classic icon of the genius in his chamber creating a full world was never true -Bach composed over the shoulders of thousands- and it is today even less true.
Everything was always a communal creation and now it is sill more son, more intensively and more at sight.

Fern

fern wrote:Absolutely correct. We even can add that heuristics about everything appertaining to intellectual creation will change and with it the notion of personal identity.
The old heuristics are falling apart. The classic icon of the genius in his chamber creating a full world was never true -Bach composed over the shoulders of thousands- and it is today even less true.
Everything was always a communal creation and now it is sill more son, more intensively and more at sight.

Fern

Have you been studying under George Orwell or something???

jdart wrote:

Don wrote: Ed is suggesting that it's just plain ok to take anybody's program as a starting point and start your own chess project from that, WITHOUT any regard to the rule of law or the licensing or the feelings of those who did not want their own work plagiarized.

I pointed out (above) that this is not allowed and I don't support it. But I think Ed's larger point was that incremental evolution from a very strong starting point is becoming the norm and if that starting point is legitimate, and the derivation from it is clear and legal, then that is a good way to advance the state of the art IMO.

That's exactly how I understood Ed's point of view

Almost.
Fact is the age of crafty men like you and me is over.
We can complain all we want, but it is so.
I still cannot understand that smart people here thinks his pet programs, no matter how much they invested in time and effort to develop them, must have a different destiny that the one experimented by everything created by human brains.
Warning: I am not talking, as some put the problem here, of 100% copies of commercial stuff. I am not talking of copyrights, etc. I am talking of techniques that are used, as in everything else, to create new particular things.
And "New particular things" means, in my view, something that perform best or differently to the one which was used as a starter.
A good illustration of this is given by painting history. Themes, techniques, etc, all of them used by one generation of artists after the other, all of them using without shame what other has used to get a higher work.
In my field, writing, a great writer said this, which maybe goes to the point:
" A great writer" he said, "is not who invented a new plot or writing technique, but the one who uses better plots and techniques invented by second rate writers".
a hug from the museum and reading Orwell, dear Bob
Fern

fern wrote:Absolutely correct. We even can add that heuristics about everything appertaining to intellectual creation will change and with it the notion of personal identity.
The old heuristics are falling apart. The classic icon of the genius in his chamber creating a full world was never true -Bach composed over the shoulders of thousands- and it is today even less true.
Everything was always a communal creation and now it is sill more son, more intensively and more at sight.

Fern

I can still see you are confused by all of this. I resent the constant implication that we are holding back progress or that we don't believe on building on the ideas of others. That is asinine and does not characterize ANY chess program author that I know of. This is always followed up with an implication of hypocrisy.

A little bit of intellectual honesty would be refreshing and a little less spin. As a chess program author I LOVE to work off of the ideas of others and I would not be on this forum if I did not feel that way. I have shared my own ideas with others and I have used ideas suggested to me by others. I think every chess program author feels the same.

Now that that is over, what the real problem here is simply taking the entire work of another author and just calling it your own. But every time this topic is raised, this is completely IGNORED or brushed aside and you immediately launch into a discussion about standing on the shoulders of giants and cooperating and giving everyone a big group hug and smugly looking down on everyone not as enlightened as cloners and their advocates are. You (not you specifically, I am just on a tirade here) cannot be more offensive than to suggest that the ones stealing the code are the enlightened ones, the cloners and their advocates. Fabien and others who have produced the original ideas are viewed as the criminals for crying foul and not willingly letting the vultures pick them clean.

Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:Please, let the 20 year olds do their own talking, they tend to have big mouths anyway. If there are much left - they can and do vote with their feet, too.

Yes, please do. I'm not 20 anymore, but I'm certainly much closer than Ed (and a large part of the work I did on the Rybka investigation was when I was 20...).

fern wrote:Almost.
Fact is the age of crafty men like you and me is over.
We can complain all we want, but it is so.
I still cannot understand that smart people here thinks his pet programs, no matter how much they invested in time and effort to develop them, must have a different destiny that the one experimented by everything created by human brains.
Warning: I am not talking, as some put the problem here, of 100% copies of commercial stuff. I am not talking of copyrights, etc. I am talking of techniques that are used, as in everything else, to create new particular things.
And "New particular things" means, in my view, something that perform best or differently to the one which was used as a starter.
A good illustration of this is given by painting history. Themes, techniques, etc, all of them used by one generation of artists after the other, all of them using without shame what other has used to get a higher work.
In my field, writing, a great writer said this, which maybe goes to the point:
" A great writer" he said, "is not who invented a new plot or writing technique, but the one who uses better plots and techniques invented by second rate writers".
a hug from the museum and reading Orwell, dear Bob
Fern

"the reports of our demise are greatly over-stated." IMHO.