Time to rethink what Vasik Rajlich has done?

[hgm]

As an amateur programmer you appear unable to understand that a commercial chess programmer with the outstandingly strongest and unassailable chess source of that time is not going to voluntarily present those source codes to a bunch of commercial competitors and wannabee chess programmers and chess programmers who have been massively insulting him for years as a hooligan and thief etc etc and who are already desperately trying to decompile his versions and find the secrets. Commercial rule 1. Keep secure your IP from outsiders.

Then he shouldn't subscribe to tournaments that as one of the conditions require him to do that. Basically you claim that he entered WCCC under false pretenses. Which is sufficient reason to ban him.

[Michel]

Another piece of evidence (not based on decompiling) was the very high move similarity between Fruit 2.1 and Rybka 1.0b as reported here

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 2113000177

(I am sure this can also be found by searching old talkchess posts).

[hgm]

how is that a flimsy excuse or even a lie? ah yes, according to some.

You are missing the point. It is compared to the claim that this excuse was never made, and is a pure fabrication of those investigating the matter. As they say, when the ridiculous is eliminated, what remains, however unlikely, becomes very plausible.

[mar]

Another piece of evidence (not based on decompiling) was the very high move similarity between Fruit 2.1 and Rybka 1.0b as reported here

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 2113000177

(I am sure this can also be found by searching old talkchess posts).

co-authored by Watkins, of course. Is that Don's old sim test? how did it score? just out of curiosity, I won't be buying the paper

but let me ask again a simple question - where is the alleged "copied code"?

[mar]

as for this https://www.chessprogramming.org/images ... _Mar11.pdf
eval "evidence" basically the same as Wegners, presented in a wannabe scientific way.

time management looks similar but considering it's so simple I wouldn't dare to claim GPL infringement here, ditto (notable is also the famous
floating comparison to 0, meh... banned for life for a floating point comparison? )

as for iterative deepening loop: again not identical but similar, also not enough to claim GPL violation in my opinion.

not to mention that the deliberate use of fruit variable names makes the reader think the similarity factor is much higher than it really is

I find it very odd that the search itself wasn't compared to Fruit nor the TT structure and so on..., but guys probably wasted enough time trying to disassemble other things

UCI parsing - that's just the silliest argument of all, not something I'd even consider gameplay code, the use of strtok, guilty!

to sum up - the eval evidence doesn't prove that code was copied (in fact it proves the opposite along with some fallacy fantasized pseudo-code that doesn't exist at all in Rybka)
ID loop/time management evidence is really dubious and quite weak to claim GPL violation and therefore ICGA rule violation (also post-1.0b Rybkas drifted away from the Fruit inspiration most likely)

it's clear that Vas was inspired by Fruit (which he said himself), the 20 elo claim due to Fruit seems false though, he likely got more than that
high sim with Fruit would imply a quite similar eval, but again I see no evidence that actual code was copied in Rybka's eval contrary to false claims

lying about depth and nps, well... it's clear Rybka was really fast rather than clever, but again that has nothing to do with alleged code copying, just not cool

it seems quite obvious to me now that despite Vas was no saint, he was most likely not guilty of what he was charged with and didn't violate ICGA's "contains gameplaying code written by others" nor did R1.0b violate GPL

[Michel]

I really don't understand why people keep coming back to this.

The ICGA clearly thought there was enough circumstantial evidence (decompiling, move similarity, variable names, Strelka, ...) for the claim that Rybka was written by modifying Fruit. In reaching this conclusion they no doubt also took Vas' past cloning of Crafty into account (and maybe also the dishonest NPS reporting in Rybka).

Vas could have easily defended himself against these allegations by showing the source code of R1.0b. When the investigation took place the source code of R1.0b was not even of commercial value anymore as Rybka had already become much stronger.

He chose not to defend himself. So nothing more needs to be said.

PS. The actual ICGA rule is "(submissions) 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".

Note the word "derived".

[towforce]

...I really don't like being told what I "need to do" in my precious spare time

Straw man argument. You can do what you like in your spare time, and you have freedom of speech - you're allowed to express the view that Vas was innocent of the charge against him.

What I am saying is that the ICGA has gone to a lot of trouble to investigate the issue and produce a report, and you're effectively calling them incompetent and dishonest. To do that credibly and effectively would require making a good clear report that specifies, with absolute clarity, all of the evidence in the original report, leaving NONE OF IT OUT. The new report would also need to provide evidence that Rybka didn't contain copied code. Finally, the new report would need to show that the evidence against copying is stronger than the evidence for copying.

I understand that it's unlikely that anybody will be willing to do that, in which case the problem you have is that:

1. Vas behaved like a guilty man

2. It's unlikely that several different people decided to co-operate on unjustly convicting Vas because they were jealous of his program having a high rating

3. If the report was easy to refute, it's surprising that nobody has made the kind of refutation I am talking about, instead limiting themselves to doing safe and easy types of objection

[Rebel]

As an amateur programmer you appear unable to understand that a commercial chess programmer with the outstandingly strongest and unassailable chess source of that time is not going to voluntarily present those source codes to a bunch of commercial competitors and wannabee chess programmers and chess programmers who have been massively insulting him for years as a hooligan and thief etc etc and who are already desperately trying to decompile his versions and find the secrets. Commercial rule 1. Keep secure your IP from outsiders.

Then he shouldn't subscribe to tournaments that as one of the conditions require him to do that. Basically you claim that he entered WCCC under false pretenses. Which is sufficient reason to ban him.

The ICGA/Rybka Fiasco: Another Perspective
By Dann Corbit

Vasik Rajlich (from an interview in 2005 conducted by Alexander Schmidt:):
“Yes, the publication of Fruit 2.1 was huge. Look at how many engines took a massive jump in its wake: Rybka, Hiarcs, Fritz, Zappa, Spike, List, and so on. I went through the Fruit 2.1 source code forwards and backwards and took many things.”

This is from “Rybka 1.0 Beta readme.rtf”, with bolding provided by me:

Special Thanks

I hesitate to include this section because I know I'll forget people who have been helpful in this project, but (with advance apologies to the omitted) here goes:

Robert Hyatt - For Crafty. There is nothing like an open source program for passing knowledge to the next generation.

Fabien Letouzey - For Fruit, which shattered a number of computer chess myths, demonstrated several interesting ideas, and made even the densest of us aware of fail-low pruning.

Tord Romstad - For making Fabien aware of fail-low pruning , and more seriously for sharing in every way possible his considerable knowledge.

Eugene Nalimov - For his cryptic but somehow fully functional endgame tablebase access code.

Uri Blass, Gerd Isenberg, Dieter Burssner, Vincent Diepeveen, Raschid Chan, Anthony Cozzie, Mridul M* , Thomas Gaksch, Peter Berger, Sandro Necchi, Ed Shroeder, Amir Ban, Christophe Theron and every one else, past and present, on the computer chess club: For sharing their computer chess knowledge despite the fact that in principle computer chess is a competitive field.
Heinz van Kempen, Guenther Simon, Olivier Deville, Sergio Martinez, Claude Dubois: for testing early versions of Rybka despite countless bugs and annoying problems.

Alex Dumov, Gabriel Luca: for helping a Windows newbie get up to around half-speed without excessive derision (or at least open derision )
and Iweta: for being great! and a pretty good Rybka tester and web master to boot

Happy testing, and best chess regards,

Vasik Rajlich
Budapest Hungary

December 4, 2005

So, considering these “confessions” it seems pretty clear that Vas admits to using ideas from Fabien Letouzey’s Fruit, Robert Hyatt’s Crafty, and Eugene Nalimov’s endgame tablebase files from the very start. Since these remarks were made with the very first release of Rybka betas, it seems pretty clear that the lineage has been spelled out from the beginning.

----------

What you call false pretenses was clear from the start.

Did you miss all that in December 2005?

Think about your readers!

[hgm]

What you call false pretenses was clear from the start.

Did you miss all that in December 2005?

Think about your readers!

No, what I call 'false premises' has absolutely nothing to do with what you mention there. The false premise I refer to is NOT that there was any falsehood in to which degree the engine was original. It is that he should be prepared to deliver source code when requested.

Are you intentionally throwing smoke again, or is your ability to understand what is being said genuinely this low?

As we know, it is all done with smoke and mirrors!

[mar]

...I really don't like being told what I "need to do" in my precious spare time

Straw man argument. You can do what you like in your spare time, and you have freedom of speech - you're allowed to express the view that Vas was innocent of the charge against him.

What I am saying is that the ICGA has gone to a lot of trouble to investigate the issue and produce a report, and you're effectively calling them incompetent and dishonest. To do that credibly and effectively would require making a good clear report that specifies, with absolute clarity, all of the evidence in the original report, leaving NONE OF IT OUT. The new report would also need to provide evidence that Rybka didn't contain copied code. Finally, the new report would need to show that the evidence against copying is stronger than the evidence for copying.

I understand that it's unlikely that anybody will be willing to do that, in which case the problem you have is that:

1. Vas behaved like a guilty man

2. It's unlikely that several different people decided to co-operate on unjustly convicting Vas because they were jealous of his program having a high rating

3. If the report was easy to refute, it's surprising that nobody has made the kind of refutation I am talking about, instead limiting themselves to doing safe and easy types of objection

that was no argument

strawman is "behaved like a guilty man" or "unlikely that blah blah"

did you actually read what I wrote? of course not so I'll condense it into one simple sentence for you:

where there is no code, there can be no code copying - and that's actually what he was accused of.
there is no Rybka pseudo-code in the binary

so yes, I might as well call "them" incompetent morons because nobody obviously even bothered to actually read the evidence