What's Vasik Rajlich doing today?

[Terry McCracken]

...... a lot of good known programmers lost interest in developing chess engines. After all I know the most for the same reason.........

In any hobby or interest, some people lose their enthusiasm and drop out.
There are always new ones that come in to replace them.
There are more chess engines available these days than ever before.

Yes, a pile of stagnate engines for the most part, little progress has been made, except for cheating in tournaments and online chess playing sites.

Thanks a lot guys!

[Frank Quisinsky]

You overread ...
Most of the programmers for the same reason!

Do you remember?
The latest open letter by a Group of programmers.
We can read a lot between the lines.

Disappointed from a weakening community to topics like this one.
A bad decision to write such an open letter. I can understand the motives. It was a bad decission for nine reasons in my view (I wrote at this time about it).

Graham, the World is motley nice.
To develops a chess engine is a hard work, same so many people do for us all the years. To test an engine is easy, to write 100 Messages about results daily in a Forum is easy too. What I do is very easy and a small contribution.

Hurra to Houdini or Rybka is an insult to a lot of persons I know. I am standing not alone here. That is a red card for honestly programmers in my view. OK, others are more cool to this Topic as I am here ... thinking on Fabian today.

Only one point I have to fight with myself.
Are open sources good for Computer chess. What should a programmer do if he have own ideas but no interest to wrote all the good known sources again and again. I think the programmer should speak about it. I am using sources x or y for my own ideas.

And here I see the biggest problem!
This programmer have to give each of the own ideas for free because others are building open sources.

More interesting as do discuss about Houdini and Rybka are to discuss about open sources. If I am honest ... here I see the biggest problem.

Sting SF is a good example!

You have to learn to accept this.
You have to learn that others are building an own opinion about it.
I have to learn to accept your opinion about it, not easy for me but each other opinion is fully OK for me.



What I can't understand ...
Why you switched your opinion for around 3-4 years?
For which reason you do that?
To many pressure as admin from TalkChess and the situation much others disucss in the Open-Source forum?

Best
Frank

[Rebel]

Go talk with Bob. Rule #2 is about copying code. You might want to argue how it is worded but that's the historical background against those who start from alien source code, make changes and call it their own.

Wrong. I can completely rewrite Fruit so that it is totally free of copyright, but produces totally identical scores and node counts on any position I let it search, submit my source code and that of Fruit to the ICGA to show them beyond any doubt that the code is completely rewritten, and they would still ban me based on rule #2. I am sure that Bob and I would agree on this, but even if he doesn't, he would be wrong.

Such a program would still fall under copyright infringement. Shows your ignorance about the matter. Don't gimme that wrong with font size 24

[hgm]

Not true. Unlike plots of books, algorithms are not protected by copyright. Only the exact implementation of the algorithm is protected by copyright. As the 'expert' you quote confirms, btw. A 'clean-room' rewrite just based on what the program does would not be a copyright infringement, and his whole argument is based on his opinion that functional equivalence does not exclude it was a clean-room rewrite.

Too bad they haven't any bigger than 24pt here, because your nonsense certainly deserves more...

[Rebel]

Start reading a bit of Substantial similarity or non literal copying.

In U.S. copyright law, substantial similarity is the standard used to determine whether a defendant has infringed the reproduction right of a copyright. The standard arises out of the recognition that the exclusive right to make copies of a work would be meaningless if infringement was limited to making only exact and complete reproductions of a work. Many courts also use "substantial similarity" in place of "probative" or "striking similarity" to describe the level of similarity necessary to prove copying has occurred.

......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

Good luck.

[Terry McCracken]

Start reading a bit of Substantial similarity or non literal copying.

In U.S. copyright law, substantial similarity is the standard used to determine whether a defendant has infringed the reproduction right of a copyright. The standard arises out of the recognition that the exclusive right to make copies of a work would be meaningless if infringement was limited to making only exact and complete reproductions of a work. Many courts also use "substantial similarity" in place of "probative" or "striking similarity" to describe the level of similarity necessary to prove copying has occurred.

......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity


Good luck.

As long as these attitudes prevail chess software development won't. There is no true AI in chess and there should be in 2015.

[Graham Banks]

......More interesting as do discuss about Houdini and Rybka are to discuss about open sources. If I am honest ... here I see the biggest problem...........

In my opinion, this cuts straight to the heart of the matter (open source).

What really bugs many is the fact that there is so much strong open source code for new programmers to learn from.
Whereas in the past, there were likely a whole lot of new engines based on learning from much weaker open source code and hardly anybody battered an eyelid, today programmers of new engines have much stronger code to study and learn from (and who can blame them for doing so, as it's perfectly legitimate).

That to me seems to be what is causing the problem in the eyes of these disgruntled programmers and a few others who're not programmers, but just want to moan anyway..

[Terry McCracken]

......More interesting as do discuss about Houdini and Rybka are to discuss about open sources. If I am honest ... here I see the biggest problem...........

In my opinion, this cuts straight to the heart of the matter (open source).

What really bugs many is the fact that there is so much strong open source code for new programmers to learn from.
Whereas in the past, there were likely a whole lot of new engines based on learning from much weaker open source code and hardly anybody battered an eyelid, today programmers of new engines have much stronger code to study and learn from (and who can blame them for doing so, as it's perfectly legitimate).

That to me seems to be what is causing the problem in the eyes of these disgruntled programmers and a few others who're not programmers, but just want to moan anyway..

That is really sad you would make such libelous claims, the world would be better off without such insidious attitudes.

There are makers and breakers and we can clearly see who they really are.

[Graham Banks]

.........It's not much different what Fabien himself said how he created Fruit from known knowledge 8 months before Rybka 1.0 was released.

http://www.top-5000.nl/Zach/rybka.htm#fabien

I am sorry to say that whether an engine is someone's "own work" makes little sense to me, although I understand that tournament directors would like a clear yes or no.

The reason is that all engines, whether amateur or commercial, share most of the techniques. Alpha-beta (of which PVS, NegaScout and MTD(f) are only derivatives), iterative deepening, check extensions, null move, etc ... are shared by most and have been published, mostly by researchers, some of them more than 30 years ago! Sure there are many different ways to represent the board and pieces but it only affects speed, which rarely amounts to more than a few dozen Elo Points.

There is one component that so far is distinct in each engine (although some older ones were probably "inspired" by Crafty): the evaluation function. But there again the evaluation features are hardly ever very original: the principles of sound chess play can be found in hundreds of books. It's hardly a secret that rooks should be placed on open files, something that Fruit does not even know (though rook mobility partly emulates this piece of knowledge).

So what is left for improvisation? A lot of course, otherwise all engines would be equal. But say in terms of quantity of code they don't represent so much. Among this "lot" I think there is a large place for things that cannot be extracted: programming style and ways of linking engine components, making them work together. Not something that most would consider as a "chess-engine technique" like null move.

OK let's stop here and do a little sum up with Fruit in mind: I can't think of a search feature in it that was not described before. Ditto for evaluation terms (except perhaps a few drawish-endgame rules that activate in one game in a hundred). There are specific principles that I follow in Fruit that gives it a personality somewhat (like never truncating the PV and making sure that mate-depth claims are always correct), but they probably have no impact on strength at all and could even hurt a little.

Can I claim that I have written it all on my own? "Yes", I typed all the code myself. Without help??? Certainly not, hence my point: "it makes no sense".

Sorry for the dramatic style ... One positive point now: instead of seeing engine authors competing against each others, I see them as cooperating (mostly indirectly) and making progress together, since they have so much in common, whether they want it or not.

My opinion anyway ...


So what changed?

[hgm]

Start reading a bit of Substantial similarity or non literal copying.

In U.S. copyright law, substantial similarity is the standard used to determine whether a defendant has infringed the reproduction right of a copyright. The standard arises out of the recognition that the exclusive right to make copies of a work would be meaningless if infringement was limited to making only exact and complete reproductions of a work. Many courts also use "substantial similarity" in place of "probative" or "striking similarity" to describe the level of similarity necessary to prove copying has occurred.

......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

Good luck.

So you don't understand what you quote?

If it has no similarity at all, it also does not have 'substantial similarity'. Yet it can do exactly the same (e.g. in a Chess engine search exactly the same tree, use the same piece values, piece-square tables).

You do not address the inconsistency of your Rybka defense, namely that the 'expert' you quote bases his criticism on the ICGA investigation on the claim that functional similarity does not prove code copying, while you claim that the functional similarity in itself is already a copyright (and thus certainly rule #2) infringement.