Re-activation Programmer Code of Honor

[Tony P.]

Re clause 2.

I feel it does need to be stricter, like, 'Not to look at reverse-engineered work of other programmers without their express permission.' So, not just to refrain from RE on your own, but also not to borrow ideas from the results of RE done by a whistleblower who's not an engine author and doesn't care about breaking PCoH.

The examination of literals like PSTs without disassembly is a rare edge case, though; it has only worked in the Fire case, which goes down as the stupidest code theft in elite chess history, considering how easy it is to encrypt constants

Note that signatures on PCoH don't apply retroactively. What Andrew has promised is that he won't attempt RE anymore. The judgment of his past examinations of Houdini and Fire is a separate matter.

[AndrewGrant]

Re clause 2.

I feel it does need to be stricter, like, 'Not to look at reverse-engineered work of other programmers without their express permission.' So, not just to refrain from RE on your own, but also not to have RE done by a whistleblower who's not an engine author and doesn't care about breaking PCoH.

The examination of literals like PSTs without disassembly is a rare edge case, though; it has only worked in the Fire case, which goes down as the stupidest code theft in elite chess history, considering how easy it is to encrypt constants

Note that signatures on PCoH don't apply retroactively. What Andrew has promised is that he won't attempt RE anymore. The judgment of his past examinations of Houdini and Fire is a separate matter.

I personally don't consider finding datatables in an engine as reverse engineering. Its something you can teach a 5 year old to do with a text editor. When I think of reverse engineering, I think of what Houdart did with Komodo. He identified a table, then found when that table was used, reversed the binary operations in order to determine the meaning of the table, then he took at understanding and put it into his own engine.

[Tony P.]

I personally don't consider finding datatables in an engine as reverse engineering. Its something you can teach a 5 year old to do with a text editor.

Actually, there's a non-chess commercial binary where I tend to look up string constants with Notepad++ as a bit of business intelligence. Its core devs know about that and still permit me to run it, so I thought my actions weren't RE either. Thanks for affirming my sanity

[Pio]

Re clause 2.

I feel it does need to be stricter, like, 'Not to look at reverse-engineered work of other programmers without their express permission.' So, not just to refrain from RE on your own, but also not to have RE done by a whistleblower who's not an engine author and doesn't care about breaking PCoH.

The examination of literals like PSTs without disassembly is a rare edge case, though; it has only worked in the Fire case, which goes down as the stupidest code theft in elite chess history, considering how easy it is to encrypt constants

Note that signatures on PCoH don't apply retroactively. What Andrew has promised is that he won't attempt RE anymore. The judgment of his past examinations of Houdini and Fire is a separate matter.

I personally don't consider finding datatables in an engine as reverse engineering. Its something you can teach a 5 year old to do with a text editor. When I think of reverse engineering, I think of what Houdart did with Komodo. He identified a table, then found when that table was used, reversed the binary operations in order to determine the meaning of the table, then he took at understanding and put it into his own engine.

How do you know he did it? It might be the other way around??? How have you verified it? Who knows? I have no interest in looking into others code. It is no fun to copy ideas of others if you cannot improve them a lot or generalise them. I understand why people have their engines private. It is no fun to play against yourself. I would hesitate a lot to make my engine open source and even if I did no one would be interested because it is so weak and I guess very different. I enjoy to share my general ideas to others but if you give code out people won’t think by themselves. They might think they understand and think they are clever because they change some small details. The worst part is that they still think they are great and others are bad even if they never come up with something original. I like to read H.G.M’s posts Ed’s (and Don Daily’s when he was alive) and some other people not so well known because they think and are original. I don’t care if someone has made another very strong engine as you only have to be a decent programmer and have no problems taking more or less everything from others.

[Terje]

Re clause 2.

I feel it does need to be stricter, like, 'Not to look at reverse-engineered work of other programmers without their express permission.' So, not just to refrain from RE on your own, but also not to have RE done by a whistleblower who's not an engine author and doesn't care about breaking PCoH.

The examination of literals like PSTs without disassembly is a rare edge case, though; it has only worked in the Fire case, which goes down as the stupidest code theft in elite chess history, considering how easy it is to encrypt constants

Note that signatures on PCoH don't apply retroactively. What Andrew has promised is that he won't attempt RE anymore. The judgment of his past examinations of Houdini and Fire is a separate matter.

I personally don't consider finding datatables in an engine as reverse engineering. Its something you can teach a 5 year old to do with a text editor. When I think of reverse engineering, I think of what Houdart did with Komodo. He identified a table, then found when that table was used, reversed the binary operations in order to determine the meaning of the table, then he took at understanding and put it into his own engine.

How do you know he did it? It might be the other way around??? How have you verified it? Who knows?

You get to pick who to trust, the guy who repeatedly cloned, going against licenses, and tried to hide the fact, or the Komodo team. It's not too difficult

[MikeB]

Re clause 2.

I feel it does need to be stricter, like, 'Not to look at reverse-engineered work of other programmers without their express permission.' So, not just to refrain from RE on your own, but also not to have RE done by a whistleblower who's not an engine author and doesn't care about breaking PCoH.

The examination of literals like PSTs without disassembly is a rare edge case, though; it has only worked in the Fire case, which goes down as the stupidest code theft in elite chess history, considering how easy it is to encrypt constants

Note that signatures on PCoH don't apply retroactively. What Andrew has promised is that he won't attempt RE anymore. The judgment of his past examinations of Houdini and Fire is a separate matter.

I personally don't consider finding datatables in an engine as reverse engineering. Its something you can teach a 5 year old to do with a text editor. When I think of reverse engineering, I think of what Houdart did with Komodo. He identified a table, then found when that table was used, reversed the binary operations in order to determine the meaning of the table, then he took at understanding and put it into his own engine.

How do you know he did it? It might be the other way around??? How have you verified it? Who knows? I have no interest in looking into others code. It is no fun to copy ideas of others if you cannot improve them a lot or generalise them. I understand why people have their engines private. It is no fun to play against yourself. I would hesitate a lot to make my engine open source and even if I did no one would be interested because it is so weak and I guess very different. I enjoy to share my general ideas to others but if you give code out people won’t think by themselves. They might think they understand and think they are clever because they change some small details. The worst part is that they still think they are great and others are bad even if they never come up with something original. I like to read H.G.M’s posts Ed’s (and Don Daily’s when he was alive) and some other people not so well known because they think and are original. I don’t care if someone has made another very strong engine as you only have to be a decent programmer and have no problems taking more or less everything from others.

Komodo team pretty much said he did....we would have not known otherwise ...

[Daniel Anulliero]

One reason I almost do no computerchess on PCs anymore is that computer chess engines are almost all similar.

They have a different name, the programmer is from a different country, but the engines do play very similar.

They come massively deep and reach 2500-3000 ELO but they play boring machine chess and have no artificial intelligence approach.

The only engine that makes fun to watch is LC0 games.

So I do have arround 6-10 pcs, but none of them runs chess anymore,

Nonsense
Just come to Graham's live tournaments, I saw a lot of very interresting games !
Even my 2380 CCRL crap can play some very clevers and beautiful moves !
Wake up we're in 2020 , not 1978

[mclane]

In the early years the machines played very different.
The source codes were secret and cut and paste was not possible.
This lead to very different engines.

Ron Nelsons first fidelity’s.
An engine from the spracklens played very different then e.g. David broughtons engine.
Mephisto 1,2 and 3 were different then any novag machines.
And Frans morschs dedicated machines were different then Ed Schroeder machines or Richard langs machines.


Then came colossus chess, don with rexchess and marty Hirsch with mchess and mark uniacke with hiarcs. Mark Lefler’s now and John Stanback Zarkov.

And they all played very individual chess.