I had been ignoring the Rybka/Ippolit/RobboLito squabble until now, since it was all in Winux land. Now that this has become the strongest available Mac engine, I had to do some digging to decide whether it would be ethical to continue using RobboLito.IanO wrote:I have absolutely no qualms trying [RobboLito] out, since I don't believe it is a clone.
Ian
After some research, I am now unclear on the lineage of Rybka -> Ippolit -> RobboLito/Tank/Igorrit etc. Aside from hearsay, has there been any evidence presented that the Ippolit program plagiarized from Rybka binaries or sources? I think the Ippolit -> RobboLito link is clear after that.
For comparison, there is the famous prior case of plagiarism in the Computer Go world, where the North Korean program KCC Igo (Silver Star) plagiarized from the world champion assembly language program Handtalk. The Handtalk author presented clear evidence of plagiarism, in the form of identical assembly code sequences and data structures, causing a scandal which dried up Go sponsorship for a whole decade. Quoting from this article by GM Raymond Keene:
(Even though such damning evidence was presented, no final decision was rendered, and the tainted KCC Igo was allowed to compete at many other tournaments. The stigma lingers: a full decade later, KCC Igo was denied entry to the Computer Olympiad, even though it has probably been completely rewritten.)His suspicions were first raised when in certain positions they played similar, bad, moves to an old version of his own Handtalk.
Professor Chen's evidence relating to Silver Igo was examined by an expert in games programming and in assembly code. This expert stated:
"Assuming that the silver.exe does contain the code bytes that Chen reports (I have no reason to doubt it), then I could say: Chen has supplied convincing evidence that silver.exe contains code in common with EHT that in my opinion is (a) inserted as "asm" and not compiled from C/C++ source, and (b) not credible as an independent invention."
My decision is complicated by the fact that there is no Rybka version supported for the Mac (rybka + microwine is a hack that doesn't work in my preferred UCI host). If I finally decide RobboLito is a clone, I then need to determine how much compensation Mr. Rajlich is due.
Ian