Re-activation Programmer Code of Honor

[Rebel]

Due to the recent turbulence regarding Houdini and Fire I re-activate the Programmer Code of Honor giving the new generation of chess programmers the possibility to present their engines and subscribe to the principles of fair competition as stipulated on this page.

Thanks so much for your attention.

Ed Schröder
September 25, 2020

http://rebel13.nl/download/programmer-c ... honor.html

[AndrewGrant]

I've added myself to your list, hopefully you'll see that shortly.

Its sad that this honor code appears to be needed, as opposed to being intrinsic. I always thought that Computer Chess was a team game. We all have the goal of making stronger, more innovative, and more exciting chess programs and tools.

Sometimes you blaze your own trail, sometimes you follow in those left behind by others. Whatever trail you may take is fine; but all should aim to not only acknowledge the works on which their programs stand, but to be able to give something back to the chess community. The work we do today, will become the basis for works years into the future. We would not be where we are today, without the work of so many brilliant, dedicated, and principled developers.

Thanks for posting this, Rebel.

[Rebel]

You are number five that subscribed (it's on) and I am glad to see that you as one of the critical programmers on Houdini and Fire (and author of a top-engine) put your money were your mouth is. It's an important signal.

[Rebel]

Seven new entries so far: Rustic, Skiull, Minic, Psycho, Ethereal, Orion, Weiss.

[mvanthoor]

Subscribed; thanks for adding my engine even though it isn't finished yet. (I just put in most of the communication infrastructure; search and part of uci still to go...)

[Tony P.]

Thank you for the peacemaking effort, Ed. I hope it makes the attitudes to respectful derivatives less negative.

Sorry for overthinking and commenting as a nonprogrammer, but fwiw, I don't think clause 3 should cover those ideas that haven't been applied to chess nor chesslike board games yet. Those who've shown an idea to work well in chess deserve credit, but the first adoption of an idea from another research domain, which is done at the programmer's own risk, isn't a theft from a chess author and should be governed by the ethics of that domain instead.

Most of the time, it's not an issue, as papers / preprints with code tend to be more usable that those without, and their code tends to be MIT / Apache / BSD licensed (at least in machine learning), making attribution a no-brainer as an homage for the implementation that works (although sometimes the benchmarks turn out ad-hoc). When a preprint is lacking code, its implementation is a risky business, as the results are less reproducible (also, recall that preprints aren't peer-reviewed), and my moral treatment of unpatented ideas from such preprints is as if they were zlib-licensed: to cite in academia and source distributions but not binaries.

So maybe narrow clause 3 down a bit, like 'When I use someone else's computer chess idea, I will mention the source...', which is what you might have meant anyway.

[Rebel]

You are right about point 3.

It's tricky to change text 50 people signed up for but I added "or otherwise".

[smatovic]

Hmm...

"2. Not to reverse engineer the work of other programmers without their express permission"

So peeking into the binaries and looking for PSQT and alike is OK?

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Srdja

[AndrewGrant]

"2. Not to reverse engineer the work of other programmers without their express permission"

I do believe this refers to reverse engineering with the intent to take ideas.
Similar to how Robert Houdart reverse engineered Komodo's Evaluation and stole tables and ideas.

[smatovic]

"2. Not to reverse engineer the work of other programmers without their express permission"

I do believe this refers to reverse engineering with the intent to take ideas.
Similar to how Robert Houdart reverse engineered Komodo's Evaluation and stole tables and ideas.

Ah, okay, I missed the imaginary * - the white knight is allowed to reverse... ;-P

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Srdja