Dr.Wael Deeb wrote:rvida wrote:... about RE:
Houdini wrote:Curiously enough, the authors of Critter and Komodo have no problem with that and actively pursue this course.
Please don't put my name nor my engine into your mouth. I am in no way an advocate of reverse engineering a closed-source engine. In fact, it is partially your fault that I decided to look into H1.5. It was because of your repeated denial (or avoidance of answering) to the question of Houdini origins despite the almost identical output of the pre-1.5 versions (1.0 & 1.03). I would have given up after a brief look if the underlying framework were much different from Ippolit, but alas it was not. Almost all of move generators / make / undo etc. were identical. And I never published any Ippo/Robbo sources with your innovations included. Apart from a very brief and incomplete description on this forum I kept them confidential.
Want to know why I think my Critter is more honest work than your Houdini? Because I wrote all the code myself. I got through the pains of porting my (then weak) engine from pascal to C. I went from 0x88 to bitboards. I tried almost all known board representations and choose one that gave the highest NPS. I tried and tested almost all ideas presented on the old CCC forum (btw. have you ever tried the botvinnik-markoff extension? - it is very powerful but very fragile). After the publication of Ippolit (due to heavy censoring on fora I was aware of it much later than most others) I was amazed by the elegance of it despite the horrible code readability. I took many things from it and tested idea after idea in _my own_ framework, and kept all the ones which worked. Sometime after version 0.90 (which was not exactly a weak engine) it started to behave in some positions like the engines from Ippolit family.
Can you see the difference?
Btw. my curiosity was entirely satisfied with H1.5. I never touched the later version.
Richard,everyone know that you're a talented and honest programmer....
Of course the same can't be said about Robert....he's a money-hungry bully with no limitations when it comes to the moral aspect....
Dr.D
I disagree with you about Robert Houdart.
The fact that you do not agree with him about what is moral does not mean that he has no limitation about the moral aspect and I clearly understand his point.
From his point of view the IPPOLIT source is public domain so he has the right to start with it and do with it what he likes and the same for other people.
You can disagree with this opinion but it does not mean that he has no limitation when it comes to the moral aspect.
Using something that is considered to be public domain is no problem for him.
reverse engineering of some program to get ideas is a different case
so Robert is against Reverse engineering of houdini.
If you claim that Ippolit is result of reverse engineering then you are probably right but I think that when the victim did nothing to stop Ippolit then it became public domain.
Same is going to be for houdini if people reverse engineer it and Robert houdart does not try to prevent publishing the information.