What's Vasik Rajlich doing today?

[Graham Banks]

......The big crime is selling 1 hour cluster time for 2000 bugs..........

Although the price is pretty steep, how can it be a crime when people are not forced to use the product?

One idea: should not Fabien get part of the profit?

Why?
I'm sure that Fabien is skilled enough to make a strong commercial chess engine of his own.

[hgm]

Well, actually I doubt that he would have any rights to these proceeds. Making the output of a program running on a cluster available to others is not copying in the sense of copyright law. It is perfectly legal to take a GPLed program, modify it a bit, and let people use it on your own cluster. As long as you don't spread the binary around, you don;t have to provie the source code either. The output of the program is not covered by the GPL.

Of course the proceeds from selling the binary would be a different matter.

[michiguel]

......The big crime is selling 1 hour cluster time for 2000 bugs..........

Although the price is pretty steep, how can it be a crime when people are not forced to use the product?

One idea: should not Fabien get part of the profit?

1) The evidence that R4+ has any Fruit code is zero.
2) Even if you make a cloud service with a GPL engine, it is totally legal since you are not distributing the binaries.

Miguel

[Rebel]

It's what I said all along, if you can't proof a derivative work then what the verdict was about is the usuage of "too many" ideas.

And even that is wrong.

Every major evaluation ingredient is coded differently, mobility, king safety, passed pawns, double pawns, backward pawns, Rybka is missing Fruit's late endgame knowledge, Rybka has a material table – different from Fruit. Rybka does not contain Fruit's quad function, Rybka’s trapped bishop evaluation is different, rook evaluation is different, bishop pair evaluation different and most importantly, Fruit evaluates in stages in a unique way whereas Rybka adds directly to its score (as every other program on the planet does).

Other key differences between Fruit and Rybka:

1.Time control is different
2.Fen parsing is different
3.Rybka extracts the mainline from the transposition table (TT), Fruit via the classic triangle table
4.Rybka 1.0 beta displays a mainline of maximum of 10 moves, Fruit produces much longer variations
5.Rybka uses a bitboard board representation whereas Fruit is mailbox
6.Rybka’s pawn value is 3200 (which is unique), Fruit uses the classic value of 100
7.The order in the evaluations of Fruit and Rybka are not similar
8.Rybka has lazy evaluation, which is absent in Fruit
9.Futility pruning is different between the two programs
10.Rybka uses Late Move Reductions (LMR) whereas Fruit uses history reductions
11.Fruit uses a history table which is absent Rybka.
12.Fruit only has one evaluation table (king safety) while Rybka has many
13.The two programs have a different move format
14.Rybka does not handle promotions to minor pieces
15.The two programs have different hash table code
16.They have different handling of repetitions and the 50-move rule in search
17.Fruit maintains piece-lists which are not present in Rybka
18.Fruit maintains a pseudo "bitboard" for pawns, Rybka has the real thing.
19.Contrary to Fruit, Rybka needs to update 4 rotations of occupancy bitboard
20.Contrary to Fruit, Rybka updates a rough estimate of material balance with weights of 1:3:3:5:10 (in the evaluation this value is then corrected by a delta obtained from the material table)
21.Fruit has a 16*16 square mailbox, Rybka has an 8*8
22.The programs have different Zobrist hash keys
23.The programs have different user interface options

We found 35 indisputable differences (some of which are very fundamental), not counting the ones that are debatable such as the Piece Square Tables (PSTs) and the contents of the TT.

Doesn't fit the definition of a derivative work.

[hgm]

Not sure what this has got to do with the issue of whether rule #2 is about copyrights. And it seems to me that in either case it is not the number of differences that is relevant, but how much was similar.

[bob]

......The big crime is selling 1 hour cluster time for 2000 bugs..........

Although the price is pretty steep, how can it be a crime when people are not forced to use the product?

One idea: should not Fabien get part of the profit?

Why?
I'm sure that Fabien is skilled enough to make a strong commercial chess engine of his own.

He is responsible for some of the code in Rybka. Generally when several people author a program, they share in the profits. One doesn't make all the money and give nothing to the others that wrote parts of the code...

[bob]

......The big crime is selling 1 hour cluster time for 2000 bugs..........

Although the price is pretty steep, how can it be a crime when people are not forced to use the product?

One idea: should not Fabien get part of the profit?

1) The evidence that R4+ has any Fruit code is zero.
2) Even if you make a cloud service with a GPL engine, it is totally legal since you are not distributing the binaries.

Miguel

I suppose it would technically legal, although that was not my point above. I was thinking in terms of morality...

[bob]

It's what I said all along, if you can't proof a derivative work then what the verdict was about is the usuage of "too many" ideas.

And even that is wrong.

Every major evaluation ingredient is coded differently, mobility, king safety, passed pawns, double pawns, backward pawns, Rybka is missing Fruit's late endgame knowledge, Rybka has a material table – different from Fruit. Rybka does not contain Fruit's quad function, Rybka’s trapped bishop evaluation is different, rook evaluation is different, bishop pair evaluation different and most importantly, Fruit evaluates in stages in a unique way whereas Rybka adds directly to its score (as every other program on the planet does).

Other key differences between Fruit and Rybka:

1.Time control is different
2.Fen parsing is different
3.Rybka extracts the mainline from the transposition table (TT), Fruit via the classic triangle table
4.Rybka 1.0 beta displays a mainline of maximum of 10 moves, Fruit produces much longer variations
5.Rybka uses a bitboard board representation whereas Fruit is mailbox
6.Rybka’s pawn value is 3200 (which is unique), Fruit uses the classic value of 100
7.The order in the evaluations of Fruit and Rybka are not similar
8.Rybka has lazy evaluation, which is absent in Fruit
9.Futility pruning is different between the two programs
10.Rybka uses Late Move Reductions (LMR) whereas Fruit uses history reductions
11.Fruit uses a history table which is absent Rybka.
12.Fruit only has one evaluation table (king safety) while Rybka has many
13.The two programs have a different move format
14.Rybka does not handle promotions to minor pieces
15.The two programs have different hash table code
16.They have different handling of repetitions and the 50-move rule in search
17.Fruit maintains piece-lists which are not present in Rybka
18.Fruit maintains a pseudo "bitboard" for pawns, Rybka has the real thing.
19.Contrary to Fruit, Rybka needs to update 4 rotations of occupancy bitboard
20.Contrary to Fruit, Rybka updates a rough estimate of material balance with weights of 1:3:3:5:10 (in the evaluation this value is then corrected by a delta obtained from the material table)
21.Fruit has a 16*16 square mailbox, Rybka has an 8*8
22.The programs have different Zobrist hash keys
23.The programs have different user interface options

We found 35 indisputable differences (some of which are very fundamental), not counting the ones that are debatable such as the Piece Square Tables (PSTs) and the contents of the TT.

Doesn't fit the definition of a derivative work.

Differences do not matter, it is the similarities and the number of them that violate rule 2. 75% of what you cite above comes from the mailbox/bitboard differences. Irrelevant in this context.

[bob]

Yes we did a lousy job at showing copyright infringement.

Wow... that's a statement to remember.

Why? we never claimed to have shown copyright infringement. It is certainly present, but the proof is much more time-consuming and was not needed to address rule 2. I called our effort lousy because that was not our task/goal. We also did (HGM can attest to this) that we did a horrible job of finishing Einstein's uniform field theorem. Also did a lousy job of proving P == NP. Of course we didn't try any of those things...

[Sean Evans]

......The big crime is selling 1 hour cluster time for 2000 bugs..........

Although the price is pretty steep, how can it be a crime when people are not forced to use the product?

One idea: should not Fabien get part of the profit?

Why?
I'm sure that Fabien is skilled enough to make a strong commercial chess engine of his own.

Fabien created Fruit, Vas copied Fruit....has the little light bulb gone off yet