Participants WCCC 2007

[Thomas Mayer]

Hi Uri,

The reason that they disqualified Gridchess in 2006(that was named lion) is the simple fact that
Crafty participated and you cannot have Bob hyatt in 2 teams.

Lion wasn't GridChess and there was no Crafty in Lion as far as I remember.

There is also a simple answer to your question

" who will participate when e.g. two participants mention fruit / toga in their programmers list ??? First wins or what ?"

The authors of fruit/toga will have to choose one and only one participant
and if they do not choose one to allow him to participate then they cannot participate.

But Uri, you can't be serious in that. Do you want that ? That in next tournament you have to play against a fruit clone, a glaurung clone, a crafty clone, a pepito clone, a phalanx clone and maybe a tripple brain of Hiarcs & Fritz just because the original authors don't start ? Come on... This is in my opinion clearly NOT in the spirit of the tournament, looks like WCCC finally totally degenerates...

Greets, Thomas

[mjlef]

No idea whether the Sleep In still exist, but no need to take an expensive hotel. There are nice camping sites near by.

Ah, but do the camp site have electric sockets and high speed Internet access! Programmers will wither and die without them!

[Gerd Isenberg]

No idea whether the Sleep In still exist, but no need to take an expensive hotel. There are nice camping sites near by.

Ah, but do the camp site have electric sockets and high speed Internet access! Programmers will wither and die without them!

Camping Zeeburg for instance is very close to the Science Park - on the other Side of the "Nieuwe Diep":

http://www.campingzeeburg.nl/whatdoweof ... ernet.html

At least they will have Internet-PCs - only four euros per hour, but not sure about high speed

[Uri Blass]

Hi Uri,

The reason that they disqualified Gridchess in 2006(that was named lion) is the simple fact that
Crafty participated and you cannot have Bob hyatt in 2 teams.

Lion wasn't GridChess and there was no Crafty in Lion as far as I remember.

There is also a simple answer to your question

" who will participate when e.g. two participants mention fruit / toga in their programmers list ??? First wins or what ?"

The authors of fruit/toga will have to choose one and only one participant
and if they do not choose one to allow him to participate then they cannot participate.

But Uri, you can't be serious in that. Do you want that ? That in next tournament you have to play against a fruit clone, a glaurung clone, a crafty clone, a pepito clone, a phalanx clone and maybe a tripple brain of Hiarcs & Fritz just because the original authors don't start ? Come on... This is in my opinion clearly NOT in the spirit of the tournament, looks like WCCC finally totally degenerates...

Greets, Thomas

.

You are right that there was no claim that lion had crafty code.
It was disqualified because it was based on the code of fruit.

I did some search by google and I found the following

http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/icga/program.php?id=86

I remember that lion had parallel search but of course it does not prove that it was based on Crafty's code.

This was the only program that was disqualified during the event so I assume wrongly that gridchess is lion.

gridchess by Kai Himstedt already participated in a tournament in the past

see http://wwwcs.uni-paderborn.de/~IPCCC/

I do not know if it was an original program or not

Uri

[Thomas Mayer]

Hi Uri,

Hi Uri,

The reason that they disqualified Gridchess in 2006(that was named lion) is the simple fact that
Crafty participated and you cannot have Bob hyatt in 2 teams.

Lion wasn't GridChess and there was no Crafty in Lion as far as I remember.

There is also a simple answer to your question

" who will participate when e.g. two participants mention fruit / toga in their programmers list ??? First wins or what ?"

The authors of fruit/toga will have to choose one and only one participant
and if they do not choose one to allow him to participate then they cannot participate.

But Uri, you can't be serious in that. Do you want that ? That in next tournament you have to play against a fruit clone, a glaurung clone, a crafty clone, a pepito clone, a phalanx clone and maybe a tripple brain of Hiarcs & Fritz just because the original authors don't start ? Come on... This is in my opinion clearly NOT in the spirit of the tournament, looks like WCCC finally totally degenerates...

.

[...]

gridchess by Kai Himstedt already participated in a tournament in the past

see http://wwwcs.uni-paderborn.de/~IPCCC/

I do not know if it was an original program or not

it definitely wasn't as they stated afterwards (?). It seems that they even used a commercial book for some of the games at Paderborn. And I do not know whether it was already clear in the beginning that it is a fruit/toga/crafty clone. Maybe Gerd can enlighten us here.
But to me it seems to be sure at least that neither Bob nor Fabien or Thomas were informed about participating there. And as far as I know usually Paderborn follows ICGA rules. Well, what shells. For me that is finally the end of competition in computerchess - when the ICGA starts this nonsense now this will soon be followed in all other tournaments.
You know, do you like to run 100 meters flat against someone who cloned Carl Lewis body just using his own head ? That's what cloning in competitions like WCCC is all about and that's why I don't like it. And that's the question where I want to have an answer from you personal.

Greets, Thomas

[Uri Blass]

Hi Uri,

Hi Uri,

The reason that they disqualified Gridchess in 2006(that was named lion) is the simple fact that
Crafty participated and you cannot have Bob hyatt in 2 teams.

Lion wasn't GridChess and there was no Crafty in Lion as far as I remember.

There is also a simple answer to your question

" who will participate when e.g. two participants mention fruit / toga in their programmers list ??? First wins or what ?"

The authors of fruit/toga will have to choose one and only one participant
and if they do not choose one to allow him to participate then they cannot participate.

But Uri, you can't be serious in that. Do you want that ? That in next tournament you have to play against a fruit clone, a glaurung clone, a crafty clone, a pepito clone, a phalanx clone and maybe a tripple brain of Hiarcs & Fritz just because the original authors don't start ? Come on... This is in my opinion clearly NOT in the spirit of the tournament, looks like WCCC finally totally degenerates...

.

[...]

gridchess by Kai Himstedt already participated in a tournament in the past

see http://wwwcs.uni-paderborn.de/~IPCCC/

I do not know if it was an original program or not

it definitely wasn't as they stated afterwards (?). It seems that they even used a commercial book for some of the games at Paderborn. And I do not know whether it was already clear in the beginning that it is a fruit/toga/crafty clone. Maybe Gerd can enlighten us here.
But to me it seems to be sure at least that neither Bob nor Fabien or Thomas were informed about participating there. And as far as I know usually Paderborn follows ICGA rules. Well, what shells. For me that is finally the end of competition in computerchess - when the ICGA starts this nonsense now this will soon be followed in all other tournaments.
You know, do you like to run 100 meters flat against someone who cloned Carl Lewis body just using his own head ? That's what cloning in competitions like WCCC is all about and that's why I don't like it. And that's the question where I want to have an answer from you personal.

Greets, Thomas

Hi Thomas,
I understand your point but I do not agree.

I think that a chess program can have more than one author.

What happens in case that some commercial program participates when one author wrote special evaluation for pawn endgame another author wrote special evaluation for rook endgames and the same for many type of endgames.

Do you think that we should not allow this program to compete?

Uri

[Gerd Isenberg]

Hi Uri,

it definitely wasn't as they stated afterwards (?). It seems that they even used a commercial book for some of the games at Paderborn. And I do not know whether it was already clear in the beginning that it is a fruit/toga/crafty clone. Maybe Gerd can enlighten us here.
But to me it seems to be sure at least that neither Bob nor Fabien or Thomas were informed about participating there. And as far as I know usually Paderborn follows ICGA rules. Well, what shells. For me that is finally the end of competition in computerchess - when the ICGA starts this nonsense now this will soon be followed in all other tournaments.
You know, do you like to run 100 meters flat against someone who cloned Carl Lewis body just using his own head ? That's what cloning in competitions like WCCC is all about and that's why I don't like it. And that's the question where I want to have an answer from you personal.

Greets, Thomas

Lion would not have been disqualified in Torino, if they had mentioned "original work based on fruit" in the entry-form with the permission from "co-author" Fabien Letouzey. They had mentioned it in a readme-file and had no explicit permission. They thought it would comply with all formalities and complained issues with english language afterwards.

On GridChess:

I was not aware that GridChess used Crafty-code already in Paderborn, but only Fruit iirc. Kay, with his "academic naivity" was a kind of shirty by the protest there, at least the book was changed for the two last rounds. I don't know who made the protest and whether it was only about the book issue and/or using Fruit.

I second that no clones or patchwork programs should be allowed in future ICGA events. But is it that simple? For instance if Bob or Fabien (or any other programmer, not necessarily open source) really likes to cooperate in a team, building a huge chess cluster like GridChess - rather than only giving the permission to use the programs - should that been forbidden? I don't think so.

The discrepancy between "I don't participate with my own program - if the ICGA chose to allow such entries, then I would have no objection, but that I personally strongly disagree with the idea in general..." and "Yes, I am a cooperating team member" is a bit vague to specify, imho.

Don't be so pessimistic, Thomas. You can choose life and Computerchess

Cheers,
Gerd

[Guetti]

Hi Thomas,
I understand your point but I do not agree.

I think that a chess program can have more than one author.

What happens in case that some commercial program participates when one author wrote special evaluation for pawn endgame another author wrote special evaluation for rook endgames and the same for many type of endgames.

Do you think that we should not allow this program to compete?

Uri

In my opinion there is a difference if some authors decide to enter the WCCC as a team (if they together wrote all parts of the engine) or if a participant uses parts of other programs he has no connetion to, adds SMP or a distibuted computing manager (even if its a lot of work) and just adds all the authors as team members.

I have no objection if somebody does that for research purposes, but to enter the World Championship original work should be entered in my oppinion.

[Thomas Gaksch]

one last comment from someone who also chose life and family and not computer chess programming (or some people would say cloning) anymore.

it is always funny how such discussions degenerate in speculations and assumptions.
fact is that Kai told me that he would like to participate in the WCCC event and i gave him my permission to use toga code in grid chess and to participate. He also told me that Fabien and Dr. Hyatt also gave their permissions.
So if it is true that all people have agreed then i think it is absolutely ok if he is allowed to participate.
that the (co-)authors have to agree guarantees that there will be only 1 engine with the fruit code. and if there will be other open source constellation for example with scorpio and glaurung it would be great (triple brain is a silly comparision). it is only a hobby for most of the engine developers and nobody has much time. in my opinion it is so silly to invent the whole wheel again and again. people who like it to implement everything from the scratch should do that but should accept that there are also people who only like to improve different parts in an open source chess engine.

i am still waiting for a toga/fruit version with an bitboard implementation. if someone would write such a version he would write 100% his own code but the engine would play 100% like fruit/toga. that would be comic.

don´t worry be happy. have fun and take computer chess not to serious.

Thomas

[Gerd Isenberg]

one last comment from someone who also chose life and family and not computer chess programming (or some people would say cloning) anymore.

it is always funny how such discussions degenerate in speculations and assumptions.
fact is that Kai told me that he would like to participate in the WCCC event and i gave him my permission to use toga code in grid chess and to participate. He also told me that Fabien and Dr. Hyatt also gave their permissions.
So if it is true that all people have agreed then i think it is absolutely ok if he is allowed to participate.
that the (co-)authors have to agree guarantees that there will be only 1 engine with the fruit code. and if there will be other open source constellation for example with scorpio and glaurung it would be great (triple brain is a silly comparision). it is only a hobby for most of the engine developers and nobody has much time. in my opinion it is so silly to invent the whole wheel again and again. people who like it to implement everything from the scratch should do that but should accept that there are also people who only like to improve different parts in an open source chess engine.

i am still waiting for a toga/fruit version with an bitboard implementation. if someone would write such a version he would write 100% his own code but the engine would play 100% like fruit/toga. that would be comic.

don´t worry be happy. have fun and take computer chess not to serious.

Thomas

Thanks for the clarification, Thomas.
Bob's first comment was not that clear at the first glance.

As I said, I don't like the idea but with the explicite permission of all co-authors and authors & authors-1 == 0, it is ok for me. Licence issues should be clarified or explained soon as well.

I'll hope you share the price money, if GridChess becomes world champ

Cheers,
Gerd