Time to rethink what Vasik Rajlich has done?

[flok]

What a interesting meta-discussion this has become.

[Rebel]

Recently moderator Dann Corbit who moved to it, you still need to remove his name from the moderator list.

That would have to be at his own request, not on yours, don't you think so?

Well, then you are deliberately spreading false information, he is no moderator any longer while the forum states he is.

We only seem to have your word for that. And we all know what that is worth...

He publicly stated here he resigned as moderator.

[hgm]

Haven't seen that. And what is more relevant, I haven't received any PM from him, nor was there any message from him in the Moderators forum section. In particular, he did not request from the admin to have his moderator rights revoked. So as far as I am concerned, it did not happen.

[Rebel]

Haven't seen that. And what is more relevant, I haven't received any PM from him, nor was there any message from him in the Moderators forum section. In particular, he did not request from the admin to have his moderator rights revoked. So as far as I am concerned, it did not happen.

forum3/viewtopic.php?p=894100#p894100

About 6 weeks ago.

[Peter Berger]

You start with a wrong assumption here, namely that this rule would have been applied to every tournament entry.

Ah, yes, I forgot. It is perfectly OK to use doping in the Tour de France. Anyone who thinks differently goes from the wrong assumption that all participants will be tested for doping, and should have his mind fixed...

To the contrary. There was some system of honour – easy to breach of course, but clearly powerful.
I will give an example from memory.
In Ramat-Gan 2004, Crafty had to play Shredder in the first round, one of the major favourites. Things went according to our evil plans, Shredder had to struggle heavily to equalize, then the game became incredibly drawish soon.
Close to the time control, Crafty crashed. There were complicated and convoluted rules on how to deal with that. I knew them, so I tried to get it to run again according to the rules – (20 minutes for that? At least according to my memory).
Crafty was operated in text mode – and no one knew me. I probably looked way more desperate than I actually was. I behaved according to the rules only to soon understand that Crafty would always crash in the given situation.
So I bended them just a little, still didn’t work. So I bended them heavily. (I just setup the postion). For one: I was too slow (which SMK clearly had realized). And I will never forget the sudden rise of his pupils when I bended the rules just a little too much.
He decided to not protest, the game became a draw soon on his offer. Who knows? This might have been the half point that Shredder missed later to become champion.
How to resign a game? You were not allowed to, unless you asked Jaak over and he decided that the game was over. Of course he had no clue compaired to the level of the engines ( who could have just decided to resign on their own). He would look at the position, and then decide whether you were allowed to resign .
The blitz event? Everyone here would think it is plain silly, but the programmers clearly just +loved+ it!
The following year I had learned to understand the system better, so when Junior made an illegal move on the actual chessboard, I just let them take it back. A bit controversial, but is was a spontaneous decision.
And then you think they would have a system to deal with people stealing code from some competitor? Fat chance. Ancient rule breaking was more about people stealing some program as a whole and just change the variable names or sth similar. It was a friendly event – people loved the social aspects, but the discussion here is completely unrelated to what actually took place at least for the time when I had the chance to have a look.

[hgm]

Haven't seen that. And what is more relevant, I haven't received any PM from him, nor was there any message from him in the Moderators forum section. In particular, he did not request from the admin to have his moderator rights revoked. So as far as I am concerned, it did not happen.

forum3/viewtopic.php?p=894100#p894100

About 6 weeks ago.

I see. Surprising.

But Dann ran for moderator, and was elected. If he wants to abandon the job, he has to hand in an official formal resignation. If you are prime minister of a country, you have to go and see the head of state to formally resign; what you tell to news reporters or to your friends at the golf club means nothing. It is the same here.

So as long as Dann doesn't present his case on the Moderators forum, he is formally still moderator here. Perhaps a moderator on strike, but that does not revoke his title.

[Wilson]

Haven't seen that. And what is more relevant, I haven't received any PM from him, nor was there any message from him in the Moderators forum section. In particular, he did not request from the admin to have his moderator rights revoked. So as far as I am concerned, it did not happen.

forum3/viewtopic.php?p=894100#p894100

About 6 weeks ago.

I see. Surprising.

But Dann ran for moderator, and was elected. If he wants to abandon the job, he has to hand in an official formal resignation. If you are prime minister of a country, you have to go and see the head of state to formally resign; what you tell to news reporters or to your friends at the golf club means nothing. It is the same here.

So as long as Dann doesn't present his case on the Moderators forum, he is formally still moderator here. Perhaps a moderator on strike, but that does not revoke his title.

I hope Dann Corbit will come back, it would be a shame if some wannabes with their attacks to Albert S. and rating lists maintainers lead him away but just to be clear I don't like what AS has done either

[hgm]

I sympathize with Dann: the chessprogramming community has largey turned into an aggressive, vindictive, spiteful bunch, who are constantly at each other's throat. At the level of the top engines. Dann is a nice guy, who thoroughly believes in the goodness of mankind, so I can understand why the disgusts this generally induces shocks him to the point of not wanting to have anything to do with it anymore.

[mjlef]

so what has he done? he sent some old crafty to compete in Olivier's chesswar (or openwar) disguised as Rybka 1.6.1 (or something) - this is lame and stupid and hard to understand. this has been proven beyond any doubt

as for "post-fruit" Rybkas - a wrong version was compared to Fruit (and even that comparison fell short, because Wegner et al were high and seeing "copied code" where there was none or imaginary at best)
so he allegedly "took too much" according to the panel, but too much is simply vague
of course, Wegner had a motivation of his own as he won WCCC with Cozzie's program later and retired as a "champ" when Vas was out of the way

if we'd look at todays top open source engines with 2011 optics, very few (if any) would pass the originality criteria back then.

I knew Zach Werner actually quite well, given social media, and discussed with him a few times by email. At the time he was still a student, not written any chess program, and his main motivation, as far as I could tell, was a new found social acceptance into a world of “famous” people, increased much by working on the “evidence” document. He was just a student and he told me afterwards that the document was just a first shot on which he expected critique and discussion. It wasn’t meant to be any final paper (Zach’s words, to me, in email). In fact, he said, the reception was no critique at all, just an immediate “great, this is just what we need”. Again, in fact, any college supervisor actually reading it with some knowledge on the subject and the necessary objectivity would have put a big red line through it and either marked him “Fail” or “Start Again”. Zach later realised that the social group he so aspired to be accepted into had collective feet of clay and were mostly either idiots or really rather unpleasant, that he had been used, and he washed his hands of computer chess and all to do with it, leaving, never to return. I guess he got a useful lesson at a relatively early age but it was not very nice for him, he being a victim of it too.
The lesson? The entire thing against Vas was fired by social group dynamic, it was a large social group, the inner core had “titles”, people are attracted to the idea of being “in”, they believe “titles”, the social group welded itself together by creating an “outside” hate figure. The hate figure suited many of them for commercial/professional/status/personal reasons. The evidence wasn’t meant to be read, it was meant to be bulky. The evidence wasn’t read. It wasn’t critiqued. The was no red team, only a blue one, and they fixed it so there was no internal disagreement.
An interesting lesson in how things can go catastrophically wrong, a lesson in how everything a social group knows can be wrong, shame it had to destroy somebody’s life in the process.

I am tired or responding to these sorts of very inaccurate postings. Zack's work on Rubka 1.0 was one of the reasons an investigation was started, but Mark Watkin's work on that and versions 2.x of Rybka were hat was mostly examined, since they were the versions close to the time of Rybka entering ICGA events. This includes comment assembly listings of the evaluations, which anyone, with time and patience, and an intel opcode book can confirm. This evidence was meant to be read and each voting investigation team member was asked if they had read this information. All that voted said yes. Rhetorical arguments about "titles" and "blue teams" says nothing. Vasik was presented the information reviewed by the panel, including summaries of the information. He provided no defense of the data presented. I saw no evidence of any hate by any panel member. People were measured in their comments, and it was clear to me they understood the work. You should stop making things up. Let the work stand for itself instead of passing along lies.

[ernest]

I sympathize with Dann: ...

Hey, what happened to the recent Rolf (who reappeared from his grave after 10 years) posts in this thread ?

They seem to have disappeared...