Previous World Champion Engine Authors Speak Out...

[wolfv]

You have said that even if found innocent, he is still guilty in your eyes. I will go you one better. If he is found guilty- he is still innocent in my eyes. Only the victim of being railroaded by a bunch of second place finishers.

What is the basis for your certainty that Vas is innocent? I imagine that Bob would say he is certain of guilt because he has reviewed the evidence and drawn conclusions from it. Have you?

That said, I think there are legitimate objections to Bob's role given that he has already expressed strong views on the subject.

Again, for the record, I am neither judge or jury. Just someone (one of three) that makes sure that every bit of evidence is brought into public view, and that Vas can, if he chooses, address each and every piece of evidence, point by point. And then those presenting the evidence can respond. And repeat until nothing new comes up. We don't need impartiality. We need fairness. Anyone that believes I am not fair in such undertakings is simply sadly mistaken. I am not going to hide evidence, or disallow Vas (or others) to respond to each piece of evidence presented. It _will_ be fair. I don't believe you could find any impartial people now since the evidence has been under discussion for a couple of years.

As a human, I am quite capable of looking at something critically, and the concluding "Bob, you made a mistake there." When that is justified. But remember, here, I was run over by a red volkswagon. I got the license plate. A dozen people caught this on video. We have clear facial photographs. We have fingerprints from the steel bar that the driver used to bang on me as he ran over me. We have a hundred eye witnesses. We found the volkswagon at the person's house. Car is titled to him. His fingerprints inside. People saw him arrive home at a time consistent with leaving the accident scene and driving directly home. My blood on the front bumper. My fingerprints on the hood where I braced with my hands as I was hit. Etc. So I _know_ exactly what happened. No subjective guesswork. Just a clear and compelling trail from accident to person driving. That's what we have here. Clear and compelling evidence. And now we have evidence that before he copied Fruit, he copied a version of Crafty between version 16.0 and 19.0. We will quantify this more accurately. There is a lot that will be seen that has not been common knowledge yet. I am certain that a rational person, after looking at what we have already seen, much less what else will be shown, will be unable to conclude anything but "something stinks here. Badly..."

Do you really want me to somehow believe that the person that ran over me is innocent, with all the evidence we had? Yet I could still run a perfectly fair trial if called on to do so, giving him every opportunity to address each point of evidence and discredit it if possible.

But you have influence over those who will make juridical decisions - and you are on a panel that has yet to even convene. I think you couldn't help yourself- and, now you're trying to talk your way out of an extremely pejorative situation where you have obviously compromised yourself and the panel.

Robert,

please try to think about this possible scenario: a scientist is investigating a phenomenon. He/she has certain expectations based on more or less random observations that seem to conform to a hypothesis (in this case 'rybka is a derivative of program X'). Then the scientist gets down to field work, starts gathering all the facts that can be found, together with his co-researchers, etc. You can never say that a scientist is _not_ expecting a particular outcome. In other words, scientists alway have certain expectations and, as a rule, are _biased_. This perfectly normal, because each and every hypothesis is 'laden with expectations', thus biased (this can be found in any textbook on the philosophy of science, and probably even in Wikipedia).

The same is happening here, in the Rybka case. Each one of us does have some expectations and each one is biased in a way. The same applies to Hyatt, who is twice as aware of the above, being an academician (I am one, too and know how he can feel). Hyatt is most likely _not_ biased so as not to recognize the validity of the opposing party, so to speak, because he's been trained to accept falsifying evidence, one way or another, even if it goes against his deepest conviction.

That's how things stand here; what is at stake are _facts_, not _personal wishes_ or opinions, or, God forbid, personal preferences and wish for some gain.

That's how I see things --- Hyatt may be a very corrupt guy, and then you would be perfectly right and wish to not have him as one of the examiners. But we have not had any evidence that he is corrupt, on the contrary, everything we have been able to conclude about him points in the other direction: he is not out there for the money, he's out there for the truth. Besides, he is a top programmer and has taught young people for years achieving great results. My own personal spell of serving here moderator with him confirms this; he's fair and keeps his word.

best

[Albert Silver]

The same is happening here, in the Rybka case. Each one of us does have some expectations and each one is biased in a way. The same applies to Hyatt, who is twice as aware of the above, being an academician (I am one, too and know how he can feel). Hyatt is most likely _not_ biased so as not to recognize the validity of the opposing party, so to speak, because he's been trained to accept falsifying evidence, one way or another, even if it goes against his deepest conviction.

Not to mention his long history of completely unbiased feelings and posts regarding Vas.

[Suji]

Not to mention his long history of completely unbiased feelings and posts regarding Vas.

Dr. Hyatt has examined the evidence, and drawn his own conclusions. Not the other way around. He's also one of the experts in the field who, biased or not, knows that two different people don't write almost identical code.

I did the first Project Euler problem, and I submitted my solution and I looked at everybody's code that solved the problem, and no two programs were the same. Everybody had a different solution to the problem, and there were some that were similar to mine, but how they structured their code was different from how I did it, thus making our code different.

After that, I came to the conclusion that it's impossible to write the same program the same way as another person unless you were copying. It just doesn't happen.

[K I Hyams]

The same is happening here, in the Rybka case. Each one of us does have some expectations and each one is biased in a way. The same applies to Hyatt, who is twice as aware of the above, being an academician (I am one, too and know how he can feel). Hyatt is most likely _not_ biased so as not to recognize the validity of the opposing party, so to speak, because he's been trained to accept falsifying evidence, one way or another, even if it goes against his deepest conviction.

Not to mention his long history of completely unbiased feelings and posts regarding Vas.

When it comes to behaving in an unbiased way, I remind you that you are the man who as a consequence of completely misrepresenting Zach’s work, had to admit that you had dismissed it without even reading it. Not everyone behaves like that. Perhaps you are projecting your foibles onto Bob.

The only claim is that he used the UCI protocol code, not any engine code.

Nonsense. You obviously didn't read (understand?) the web page.

I did not read the page at all. I read the opinions of the programmers here, some (such as yourself) of whom thought it was evidence, and others not.

When I was teaching, I would have to deal with pupils whom I neither liked or trusted. Nevertheless, I did not lower their marks unfairly, I did not write lies about them on reports and if I had to carry out investigations into their behaviour, I would do so without bias. Nothing particularly unusual there, it is simply the way in which reasonable and responsible professionals normally behave. To imply that Bob is anything less than that is simply insulting.

[geots]

I agree that Hyatt being in the committee seems wrong.

Hyatt to me is one of the main accusers, he has systematically gathered, structured and argued for the evidence that Rybka is a Fruit clone.

People who have such direct involvement (on any side) cannot be considered "impartial judges".

The best would be if they have some scientists/authors from related fields, like go/checkers/whatever who can fully comprehend the evidence presented but do not have any previous involvement in the issue, whatsoever.

This is what has been wrong with this process from the beginning. You are assuming facts not in evidence. I am not a judge. I will not decide innocence or guilt. I will not hand down a sentence. I am simply supposed to keep the investigation on the topic of "Did Vas copy parts of Fruit (or other programs) verbatim?" We are starting with Rybka 1 beta, but that is not the only version that will be addressed. We may go back to earlier versions, or to later versions (thru Rybka 4) since all have competed.

The panel that will do this is quite large and consists of a large number of programmers. The three "secretariat" members are simply there to try to keep the discussion limited to the specific topic of the investigation, and prevent all the other noise that always shows up here on CCC from obfuscating the technical merits of the arguments being made.

But nobody is paying attention to the document David sent out describing our function. They are making up their own incorrect assumptions and then complaining that those are not fair. However, they are also not real.

In U.S. where you are from to the best of my knowledge, the judge does not decide innocence or guilt, the jury does. The judge is largely responsible for the procedure, as you are in this case.

If you were to stand a trial, would you agree to have as the person responsible for moderating a fair and impartial process someone who has actively gathered, structured and argued on the prosecution side?

That is pretty much the way it works. Who do you think pays the judge? Do you find them in the same building with the district attorney that prosecutes the case? In some types of cases a judge does decide the result. In a jury trial he does not.

Surely there are many specialists who haven't had such a direct involvement in accusing Rajlich, and who could be a moderator? Many wouldn't have your credentials in the field but is that so crucial for moderation? So the question here is: why not someone else as a judge? After years of finger-pointing there at last is a hope for a credible process; by sitting as a judge you are giving the other party the opportunity to call this a witch hunt and dismiss the whole process, on the objective basis that one of the main accusers is sitting as a judge!

To sit on a bench, or try a case, you have to have the proper credentials, experience, training, background, education, etc. I would not want someone off the street to serve as judge for any trial involving me. I'd want a judge that is familiar with the law. There are always checks and balances. My only goal here is to make certain all the evidence is presented, and that Vas has a chance to respond point by point. And for this tete' a tete' to continue until everything that needs saying has been said, by both sides. Then the ICGA will have the ball kicked into their court to decide what, if anything, should be done...

I want judges that are willing to punish. I want prosecutors that diligently try to prove a defendant guilty. I want a vigorous defense of that defendant so that at the end of the day, hopefully justice will be served. At some point, you have to trust the system, and the people involved. In this case I believe there will be enough evidence available that the ICGA won't have to give much thought to innocence or guilt, and that they will have access to all the mitigating arguments the defense might present. At that point, it is their ballgame.

I cant believe you wrote all the above. All you "want" is for Vas to be found guilty. Trying to hide it in a civics lesson wont work. You stated that you were asked to take this particular position in the matter. Well, if you have any character left at all, you will step down and let unbiased people handle this- if any can be drug up.

But in the end, they can drool on about this and that and what they think, but nothing will be decided unless they have access to the code or codes from later versions after Beta 1, and Vas is not stupid enough to give you or them access to any of it. Face it- you are not going to find out why he is so much smarter than you and the rest. And in the end, that is all this witch hunt is about. All this bullshit needs to be sold to someone who's buying.

[mhull]

All you "want" is for Vas to be found guilty. Trying to hide it in a civics lesson wont work. Well, if you have any character left at all, you will step down and let unbiased people handle this- if any can be drug up.

If one is going to question another man's character he must first possess some himself.

[geots]

In programming, especially a chess program, adopting significantly large and critical blocks of very specific symbiotic logic and factored weights verbatim is only permissible in an acknowledged code fork. It certainly couldn't pass the smell test as an original work. And the distance between subsequent versions to the plagiarized starting point will hardly matter (to most people) if a programmer is shown to be so dishonest.

Ordinarily yes. What makes the Rybka situation special is that Vas couldn't have adopted "significantly large and critical blocks of very specific symbiotic logic and factored weights verbatim" as Rybka is bitboard and Fruit is mailbox. At least for the evaluation and move generation code it would have to be coded completely different - that is a fact. We also know that Rybka has new important material terms in the evaluation and the search seems original as well.
What they need to prove then, is either that some other parts of the engine contains large parts of copied code (for instance the hashing or protocol) or that large parts of the bitboard code is functionally equivalent to the mailbox code. The latter is a bit problematic however, as most engines are known to contain certain large parts of functionally equivalent codes, like for instance the SEE, Qsearch, Nullmove and so forth. No one would claim Fruit was a derivative of Crafty just because it had sections of nullmove code that was functionally equivalent to Crafty for instance.

What annoys me most about this whole issue is that we do not have objective means and rules to specify what is legal to copy and what is not. It's always a judgement call in every single case. This makes the whole process too ad hoc and un-scientific IMHO.
The process should be reversed, first we need to establish what is legal and what is not, then we need to decide how to punish the rule breakers and only then does it make sense to begin considering the individual engines. Otherwise we are having a trial and jury with no accepted laws to judge by.

Amen to that! Above we actually have a man with a brain that is not afraid to speak out and tell the truth.

[Martin Thoresen]

If the panel needs an unbiased person, feel free to contact me.

[Albert Silver]

The same is happening here, in the Rybka case. Each one of us does have some expectations and each one is biased in a way. The same applies to Hyatt, who is twice as aware of the above, being an academician (I am one, too and know how he can feel). Hyatt is most likely _not_ biased so as not to recognize the validity of the opposing party, so to speak, because he's been trained to accept falsifying evidence, one way or another, even if it goes against his deepest conviction.

Not to mention his long history of completely unbiased feelings and posts regarding Vas.

When it comes to behaving in an unbiased way, I remind you that you are the man who as a consequence of completely misrepresenting Zach’s work, had to admit that you had dismissed it without even reading it.

Link? (to the part about 'completely misrepresenting Zach's work', since I have not read it)

[gerold]

If the panel needs an unbiased person, feel free to contact me.

Hi Martin.
If you know C language and read assembly code.
They may need you.

Best,
Gerold.