CB: Feedback on the ICGA/Rybka disqualification scandal

[Norm Pollock]

I just don't see that Bob has an "evil" agenda. Sometimes Bob is too forceful or opinionated (as I can sometimes be too) which offends people who lack humility but he is basically a good guy. What would be his motivation for going after Vas? If it was for competitive reasons he would not publish his source code and be so helpful to anyone who asks questions and he doesn't make money from computer chess that I know of and even if he did how is Vas any kind of threat to him?

Off topic, but I don't think Bob would be allowed to profit from a chess engine, even if he wanted to, assuming he did his development at his University. I think the University would be the "owner" of the property,

[Rolf]

I'm not saying that I don't think he tried to obfuscate the output or that he didn't lose the source code, those things are both very suspicious but I'm uncomfortable with making such an indirect inference.

Please try to argue this way about the evil agenda of Bob when he always metions a continual lying or such against Ed. How does he know anything about Ed's character or that of Vas?

I am certain that actually we hadnt this total split of two parties if from the beginning this debate about suspicions about copycoding would have been processed without any character assassination. I fight against it for many years. But apparently many here are being misleaden by Bob's overall fame, so any idea or suspicion from him must be the truth per se.

The truth is somewhere else but not with Bob alone!

I just don't see that Bob has an "evil" agenda. Sometimes Bob is too forceful or opinionated (as I can sometimes be too) which offends people who lack humility but he is basically a good guy. What would be his motivation for going after Vas? If it was for competitive reasons he would not publish his source code and be so helpful to anyone who asks questions and he doesn't make money from computer chess that I know of and even if he did how is Vas any kind of threat to him?

The answer to these questions is all in the archives of this forum. My summary, yes, Bob is basically a good guy with a good heart. I am talking as a nobody in CC with him for almost two decades now and he almost never put me down for my ignorance compared to his knowledge of these millions of details in this field. I for one as psychologist can never condemn someone because almost always I understand his motives. Of course by that logic I could also "understand" ordinary criminals but this is another story.

As Albert clarified in his post right now, Bob has spoken about the reasons for his problems wih Vas more than once.

For him Vas did take everything that the community could give and then he didnt give back instead he went commercial.

That was his main motive against Vas long before any evidence came up.

If it now comes out that the data of the alleged identity of Fruit and Rybka 1 is a fake then Bob would lose his innocernce. Not to speak of Zach and later Mark H. Basically the ICGA panel decision is bogus.

That is a terrible mess and I hope that we have some guys with us who have the courage to quickly heal the desastruous consequences of the witch hunt aka lynch justice by Bob Hyatt.

What happened for the mess? IMO it's just a sort of fixation on the old paradigm against the new one which was created by Fabien and one or two others.

I have this in a reference by Ingo Althöfer in the German CSS forum who recalled a paper SMK made public in a collquium at Jena at the end of 2005 after Shredder had lost the Wch in Reykjavijk in August 2005 against Zappa and Fruit.

For those who dont read German let me shortly sum up from memory.

What is the news in CC programming at 2005?

Main difference is that the new programs like Fruit had a spartanic like expansion focussing on search depth and speed. While the older ones like Shredder or Junior and Diep were overloaden with all the features from experience of the past.
Ingo recalls that Fabien was already engagend into slim bots through his participation in the Othello scene where fast and slim bots were quite normal and successful already.

Don, here you might see the difficulty for someone like Bob who was mainly seeking relevant new features over the years to make his Crafty always stronger bit by bit and slowly. It would have been idiotic for Bob to throw almost everything out only to remain with a skeleton like frame work! So, by force he must have felt cheated by the sudden almost instant success for someone who had asked so many naive questions months before. Because Bob felt that _he_ were dominating the fashion in computerchess when he had already lost contact with the new development.

I would have expected tht someone would have informed Bob here earlier than now when it was too late.

Because Bob will certainly win back his confidence if he realises that Vas isnt a cheater or thief but just someone who had better understood the new paradigma back in 2005.

But the inexcusable evil has already been done.

How could Vas now be recompensated for the mess he was brought in by these famous names Hyatt Theron or Wegener Watkins? And now also Levy and the ICGA!?

Especially as a scientist Bob has screwed it. He simply waved hands before the inexplicable 300+ ELO which Rybka had better than everybody else which cannot be explained by copycoding of any stretch.

I just wanted to give the messenger as reporter, but I am not an expert at all. Hope this could still help you all.

[Graham Banks]

I just don't see that Bob has an "evil" agenda. Sometimes Bob is too forceful or opinionated (as I can sometimes be too) which offends people who lack humility but he is basically a good guy. What would be his motivation for going after Vas? If it was for competitive reasons he would not publish his source code and be so helpful to anyone who asks questions and he doesn't make money from computer chess that I know of and even if he did how is Vas any kind of threat to him?

Off topic, but I don't think Bob would be allowed to profit from a chess engine, even if he wanted to, assuming he did his development at his University. I think the University would be the "owner" of the property,

I wonder if Chessbase has to pay somebody to be able to provide a Chessbase native version of Crafty?

[Don]

I just don't see that Bob has an "evil" agenda. Sometimes Bob is too forceful or opinionated (as I can sometimes be too) which offends people who lack humility but he is basically a good guy. What would be his motivation for going after Vas? If it was for competitive reasons he would not publish his source code and be so helpful to anyone who asks questions and he doesn't make money from computer chess that I know of and even if he did how is Vas any kind of threat to him?

Off topic, but I don't think Bob would be allowed to profit from a chess engine, even if he wanted to, assuming he did his development at his University. I think the University would be the "owner" of the property,

There is no rule that prevents University researchers from profiting from their research. Many startups spring from this kind of thing.

[Graham Banks]

I just don't see that Bob has an "evil" agenda. Sometimes Bob is too forceful or opinionated (as I can sometimes be too) which offends people who lack humility but he is basically a good guy. What would be his motivation for going after Vas? If it was for competitive reasons he would not publish his source code and be so helpful to anyone who asks questions and he doesn't make money from computer chess that I know of and even if he did how is Vas any kind of threat to him?

Off topic, but I don't think Bob would be allowed to profit from a chess engine, even if he wanted to, assuming he did his development at his University. I think the University would be the "owner" of the property,

There is no rule that prevents University researchers from profiting from their research. Many startups spring from this kind of thing.

In that case my previous question was irrelevant. Personally I can't see a reason why researchers can't profit from their work if there are no stipulations that they can't.

[K I Hyams]

Julian has said that his initial efforts to compare Fruit and Rybka output have shown no similarity between them. I suggested that there was a similarity in a post of mine earlier in this thread and so, until I have time to check, I am quite happy to withdraw that suggestion.

Well, my intention is to put to check by myself any assertion by one camp or the other, as far as I can do it by myself. Time to trust people without checking by myself is finished.

The current assertion to put to test is this one :

Rick Fadden, Barre, Vermont, USA
(...) People noted that Rybka search looked like Fruit search once the obfuscation was removed.

So here is what I did (I give all the links and procedure so everyone can reproduce everything by himself).

1- First, I downloaded Rybka 1.0 beta there: http://www.superchessengine.com/Rybka%20v1.0betaw32.rar
2- Then I downloaded Fruit 2.1 there: http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/download ... uit_21.zip
3- Then I downloaded Rick Fadden's patch there: http://rybkaforum.net/mwf/rybkaattach/9 ... h9_NEW.zip
4- According to this forum, the patch couldn't be applied starting from Windows Vista, because of some incompatibility withthe real-time patcher. That wasn't a problem, as the pascal source code was included. I just compiled it with FreePascal and applied it to my Rybka binary. Everything went fine and I now had an unobfuscating Rybka 1.0 beta. Ready to test.

I decided to add a third engine to the benchmark, as a control. I chose Glaurung 2.0b, as it's strong and old, although not as much as Rybka and Fruit.......................


.........................So, sorry, but I can't replicate Rick's assertion. And I must say I feel bitrayed by those who make those fake assertions. I also read Ed's Rybka page, and I'm not sure anymore that Vas is guilty.

If I make an history of my opinion regarding Rybka, it goes that way:
1- before Fabien's open letter: 1% maybe he's guilty, 99% not guilty. (despite some of my best chess computing camarades being sure it was a Fruit clone, but I just couldn't see how a clone could be 300 Elo points stronger...).
2- After Fabien's letter: 50% guilty, 50% not guilty.
3- After ICGA's report: 90% guilty, 10% not guilty.
4- today: 50% guilty, 50% not guilty (= I don't know, which means "not guilty" if I'm in a jury).

Fadden comes across as a very talented guy. Either way, Mark Watkins compliments his work in his latest .pdf. I would love to see Rck's results, if he went to the trouble of writing a tool, he will have made good use of it and the fact that he made it available for others to check his results and conclusions is also significant.

[JuLieN]

Fadden comes across as a very talented guy. Either way, Mark Watkins compliments his work in his latest .pdf. I would love to see Rck's results, if he went to the trouble of writing a tool, he will have made good use of it and the fact that he made it available for others to check his results and conclusions is also significant.

Yes, but he is not the one who said that Rybka and Fruit have very resembling output. He didn't. He just said that Rybka is obfuscating its output (which is true) and he gave us a tool to unobfuscate it.

Some others (who???) said that the resulting output was resembling to Fruit's. And that's what I couldn't replicate at all.

[Rebel]

Fadden comes across as a very talented guy. Either way, Mark Watkins compliments his work in his latest .pdf. I would love to see Rck's results, if he went to the trouble of writing a tool, he will have made good use of it and the fact that he made it available for others to check his results and conclusions is also significant.

Would like to have the patch too. Perhaps it only undoes the depth obfuscation of 2 and not the main variants Julien?

It's the way I interpreted Fadden's words.

[JuLieN]

Would like to have the patch too.

I've put all the links in the beginning of my big post above Here they are again:

So here is what I did (I give all the links and procedure so everyone can reproduce everything by himself).

1- First, I downloaded Rybka 1.0 beta there: http://www.superchessengine.com/Rybka%20v1.0betaw32.rar
2- Then I downloaded Fruit 2.1 there: http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/download ... uit_21.zip
3- Then I downloaded Rick Fadden's patch there: http://rybkaforum.net/mwf/rybkaattach/9 ... h9_NEW.zip
4- According to this forum, the patch couldn't be applied starting from Windows Vista, because of some incompatibility withthe real-time patcher. That wasn't a problem, as the pascal source code was included. I just compiled it with FreePascal and applied it to my Rybka binary. Everything went fine and I now had an unobfuscating Rybka 1.0 beta. Ready to test.

Perhaps it only undoes the depth obfuscation of 2 and not the main variants Julien?

It's the way I interpreted Fadden's words.

For the variant I don't know, but I can't think of an algorithm that would "invent" a convincing alter-variant for the display (you would nearly need another "secret" engine hidden inside Rybka to do that.) Also, there would be no point as the "best move" found by Rybka isn't the one found by Fruit either.

[Rebel]

Would like to have the patch too.

I've put all the links in the beginning of my big post above Here they are again:

Missed that one

But unfortunately the patch won't run under Windows7-64-bit.

I don't consider it very important, the depth -2 obfuscation is known and as far as I know never disputed, the main-line obfuscation is also an issue I missed at the time it was discussed.