Peter Skinner wrote:Since when is one allowed to enter a non-original work into the WCCC?
If this engine has parts from many other engines it should _not_ be allowed to participate. It is simply not an original engine.
What is to stop someone of just completely cloning an engine and entering it under a different name? Obviously nothing by the ICGA's rules.
When are the idiots at the ICGA actually going to do something useful? Or is money the only thing they care about?
Just when you thought you have seen everything...
Do you say that you are against the participation of gridchess even if we assume that the authors that are mentioned do not participate with different program and have no objection to the participation of gridchess?
There are different reasons to be against the participation of gridchess(for example in case that Bob hyatt or Fabien are against using their work in WCCC) but the fact that it is a work of more than one person is not a logical reason to be against the participation of it.
Peter Skinner wrote:Since when is one allowed to enter a non-original work into the WCCC?
If this engine has parts from many other engines it should _not_ be allowed to participate. It is simply not an original engine.
What is to stop someone of just completely cloning an engine and entering it under a different name? Obviously nothing by the ICGA's rules.
When are the idiots at the ICGA actually going to do something useful? Or is money the only thing they care about?
Just when you thought you have seen everything...
Do you say that you are against the participation of gridchess even if we assume that the authors that are mentioned do not participate with different program and have no objection to the participation of gridchess?
There are different reasons to be against the participation of gridchess(for example in case that Bob hyatt or Fabien are against using their work in WCCC) but the fact that it is a work of more than one person is not a logical reason to be against the participation of it.
Uri
How close is close enough to be a close derivative?
1. Each entry is a computing system and one or more humans who programmed it. At least one of the program developers should attend the WCCC to operate the program, otherwise the entry fee for the program is doubled.
2. Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details. Programs which are discovered to be close derivatives of others (e.g., by playing nearly all moves the same), may be declared invalid by the Tournament Director after seeking expert advice. For this purpose a listing of all game-related code running on the system must be available on demand to the Tournament Director.
Guetti wrote:
Yes, come on guys, strip toghether some parts of glaurung, scorpio and fruit and off you go to the WCCC.
Since all co-authors are mentioned and should have given their permission - and no other of the mentioned programs participate - it is ok for me but I am not entirely shure about the more ambitious participants like Vincent.
In fact Vincent does not really care. But I, a less ambitious participant, am worried. All participating teammembers should at least know and accept that they are participating. Are they? If they are, I still do not like it, but will accept it. If not, I will have strong objections against it.
Richard.
Christopher Conkie wrote:
How close is close enough to be a close derivative?
1. Each entry is a computing system and one or more humans who programmed it. At least one of the program developers should attend the WCCC to operate the program, otherwise the entry fee for the program is doubled.
2. Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details. Programs which are discovered to be close derivatives of others (e.g., by playing nearly all moves the same), may be declared invalid by the Tournament Director after seeking expert advice. For this purpose a listing of all game-related code running on the system must be available on demand to the Tournament Director.
Christopher
There is no question that Gridchess is a clone of something.
Allowing the entry of this program into the tournament will land future tournament entries on a very slippery slope. Who is to say what or how much of one program is within a given program?
Add the fact that Robert knew _nothing_ of this entry. Also if it is based partially on Fruit, does it get classified as a commercial entry? They could say they used the GPL'd version of Fruit but who is really to say for sure?
This is going to open a can of worms that really should just be buried...
Peter
I was kicked out of Chapters because I moved all the Bibles to the fiction section.
GridChess by Kai Himstedt and Ulf Lorenz
Thomas Gaksch Toga parts
Fabien Letouzey Fruit parts
Robert Hyatt Crafty parts
No idea whether the Sleep In still exist, but no need to take an expensive hotel. There are nice camping sites near by.
Come on guys, take a week off, register and come to Amsterdam and lets have a huge computer chess party.
Cheers,
Gerd
what is the "Crafty parts" about???
As mentioned in the short description, Crafty has the master role to control the optimistic pondering. They didn't ask you for permission? I am not sure about your license policy and the exact rules of the ICGA, but according to my naive standards I would reckon that asking for permission is required. Same for Fabien and Thomas with source under GPL.
GridChess is composed of two major components: 1) The proxy chess engine (Crafty based) performs no tree search itself but has some kind of a master role to control the optimistic pondering with distributed worker clients. As a simplified explanation of optimistic pondering here, one can imagine the worker clients forming a pondering pipeline with expected opponent moves extracting this information from the principal variations provided by the chess engines. 2) Real chess engines (controlled by distributed worker clients), Fruit/Toga based, parallelized with Young Brothers Wait Concept (YBWC). This way a combination of two parallel concepts was realized building the complete GridChess system: The parallel Fruit/Toga base engines using the YBWC may run on high performance clusters, each cluster representing a worker client for the proxy chess engine. Several such clusters are then used for an asynchronous distributed game-tree search with the optimistic pondering method.
OK... this makes a little more sense now. I was contacted a while back and asked about it. My response was along the lines of this:
(a) I'm not going to participate this year as things were thrown together too quickly and there was not enough time to make the kind of preparations we would normally want for playing in a WCCC (hardware, book, program changes, etc.)
(b) I have strong reservations about allowing any "entity" to compete if it is based primarily on one or more chess programs, even if the authors agree. If one of the agreeing authors also participates then I would be 100% against the idea since two entries for the same program should not be allowed (but there is precedent as ICCA allowed "Gunda" (a crafty clone) to enter the WCCC in either 1996 or 1997, so there is a bit of precedent albiet a bad one.
(c) I told them that if the ICGA chose to allow such entries, then I would have no objection, but that I personally strongly disagreed with the idea in general...
Peter Skinner wrote:Since when is one allowed to enter a non-original work into the WCCC?
If this engine has parts from many other engines it should _not_ be allowed to participate. It is simply not an original engine.
What is to stop someone of just completely cloning an engine and entering it under a different name? Obviously nothing by the ICGA's rules.
When are the idiots at the ICGA actually going to do something useful? Or is money the only thing they care about?
Just when you thought you have seen everything...
Do you say that you are against the participation of gridchess even if we assume that the authors that are mentioned do not participate with different program and have no objection to the participation of gridchess?
There are different reasons to be against the participation of gridchess(for example in case that Bob hyatt or Fabien are against using their work in WCCC) but the fact that it is a work of more than one person is not a logical reason to be against the participation of it.
Uri
How close is close enough to be a close derivative?
1. Each entry is a computing system and one or more humans who programmed it. At least one of the program developers should attend the WCCC to operate the program, otherwise the entry fee for the program is doubled.
2. Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details. Programs which are discovered to be close derivatives of others (e.g., by playing nearly all moves the same), may be declared invalid by the Tournament Director after seeking expert advice. For this purpose a listing of all game-related code running on the system must be available on demand to the Tournament Director.
Christopher
"close derivatives of others" is written in 2 and I understand "others" as programmers that are not part of the team so being close derivatives of toga is no problem when Fabien(fruit part) and Thomas(toga part) are part of the team.
GridChess by Kai Himstedt and Ulf Lorenz
Thomas Gaksch Toga parts
Fabien Letouzey Fruit parts
Robert Hyatt Crafty parts
No idea whether the Sleep In still exist, but no need to take an expensive hotel. There are nice camping sites near by.
Come on guys, take a week off, register and come to Amsterdam and lets have a huge computer chess party.
Cheers,
Gerd
what is the "Crafty parts" about???
As mentioned in the short description, Crafty has the master role to control the optimistic pondering. They didn't ask you for permission? I am not sure about your license policy and the exact rules of the ICGA, but according to my naive standards I would reckon that asking for permission is required. Same for Fabien and Thomas with source under GPL.
GridChess is composed of two major components: 1) The proxy chess engine (Crafty based) performs no tree search itself but has some kind of a master role to control the optimistic pondering with distributed worker clients. As a simplified explanation of optimistic pondering here, one can imagine the worker clients forming a pondering pipeline with expected opponent moves extracting this information from the principal variations provided by the chess engines. 2) Real chess engines (controlled by distributed worker clients), Fruit/Toga based, parallelized with Young Brothers Wait Concept (YBWC). This way a combination of two parallel concepts was realized building the complete GridChess system: The parallel Fruit/Toga base engines using the YBWC may run on high performance clusters, each cluster representing a worker client for the proxy chess engine. Several such clusters are then used for an asynchronous distributed game-tree search with the optimistic pondering method.
OK... this makes a little more sense now. I was contacted a while back and asked about it. My response was along the lines of this:
(a) I'm not going to participate this year as things were thrown together too quickly and there was not enough time to make the kind of preparations we would normally want for playing in a WCCC (hardware, book, program changes, etc.)
(b) I have strong reservations about allowing any "entity" to compete if it is based primarily on one or more chess programs, even if the authors agree. If one of the agreeing authors also participates then I would be 100% against the idea since two entries for the same program should not be allowed (but there is precedent as ICCA allowed "Gunda" (a crafty clone) to enter the WCCC in either 1996 or 1997, so there is a bit of precedent albiet a bad one.
(c) I told them that if the ICGA chose to allow such entries, then I would have no objection, but that I personally strongly disagreed with the idea in general...
Was this in general , or were you told it was about a Crafty derivate ?
Guetti wrote:
Yes, come on guys, strip toghether some parts of glaurung, scorpio and fruit and off you go to the WCCC.
Since all co-authors are mentioned and should have given their permission - and no other of the mentioned programs participate - it is ok for me but I am not entirely shure about the more ambitious participants like Vincent.
In fact Vincent does not really care. But I, a less ambitious participant, am worried. All participating teammembers should at least know and accept that they are participating. Are they? If they are, I still do not like it, but will accept it. If not, I will have strong objections against it.
Richard.
I wonder why do you consider yourself less ambitious than vincent.
I will not be surprised if The baron is going to score more points than diep in WCCC.
Guetti wrote:
Yes, come on guys, strip toghether some parts of glaurung, scorpio and fruit and off you go to the WCCC.
Since all co-authors are mentioned and should have given their permission - and no other of the mentioned programs participate - it is ok for me but I am not entirely shure about the more ambitious participants like Vincent.
In fact Vincent does not really care. But I, a less ambitious participant, am worried. All participating teammembers should at least know and accept that they are participating. Are they? If they are, I still do not like it, but will accept it. If not, I will have strong objections against it.
Richard.
I wonder why do you consider yourself less ambitious than vincent.
I will not be surprised if The baron is going to score more points than diep in WCCC.
I don't think ambition has much to do with it, which is why I repeated the 'ambitious' word in my reply to Gerd. It is a matter of principle. I do not see a big difference with someone taking Pepito or Phalanx sources, modify a few bits and participate, naming the original authors as team members. This is why I think the least that can be expected would be an explicit consent of (all of) the original authors to let such a program participate. Whether I like it or not becomes irrelevant in that case.
Richard.
