WCCC 2024 participants are announced

[Guenther]

It's just so funny that our armchair lawyer thinks GPL entitles anyone with the same rights as an original author in the context of law, and we actually had been through this with a real lawyer while sueing another fraud.

That is the case that was settled out of court, right?

If you are so confident, by all means go to court, suing the ICGA for allowing an engine to participate in a tourney they organize that contained some code you released under GPL. Thenw e can all have a big laugh. :lol:

1. GPL has nothing to do with the rules of ICGA
2. I guess you never saw this answer from the whoever chief of ICGA, replied to some objections (by 'crem') against ShashChess via email

Thank you for pointing out the issues with Shashchess. Their case generated two months of discussion between

• . We had input from the Stockfish team, who were apathetic to Shashchess's entry. We also had to verify that Shashchess represents a significant difference from Stockfish.
  
  This was a difficult case to consider. In the end, I decided that the WCCCs would be a better competition with a Stockfish variant than without (especially given the special nature of this particular year's competition).

How anyone could find it significantly different from Stockfish is beyond comprehension, except people, who never have programmed, nor seen any
of both sources have made this judgement.

Actually it looks from the last sentence that they/he were/was desperately seeking for an entry of an SF alike, which contradicts part 1.

[chrisw]

It's just so funny that our armchair lawyer thinks GPL entitles anyone with the same rights as an original author in the context of law, and we actually had been through this with a real lawyer while sueing another fraud.

That is the case that was settled out of court, right?

If you are so confident, by all means go to court, suing the ICGA for allowing an engine to participate in a tourney they organize that contained some code you released under GPL. Thenw e can all have a big laugh.

1. GPL has nothing to do with the rules of ICGA
2. I guess you never saw this answer from the whoever chief of ICGA, replied to some objections (by 'crem') against ShashChess via email

Thank you for pointing out the issues with Shashchess. Their case generated two months of discussion between

• . We had input from the Stockfish team, who were apathetic to Shashchess's entry. We also had to verify that Shashchess represents a significant difference from Stockfish.
  
  This was a difficult case to consider. In the end, I decided that the WCCCs would be a better competition with a Stockfish variant than without (especially given the special nature of this particular year's competition).

How anyone could find it significantly different from Stockfish is beyond comprehension, except people, who never have programmed, nor seen any
of both sources have made this judgement.

Actually it looks from the last sentence that they/he were/was desperately seeking for an entry of an SF alike, which contradicts part 1.

Here's the deal and this is all that matters:

The World Computer Chess Championships will be co-located with ECAI 2024, the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This will be the 50th anniversary of a series of tournaments that began in Stockholm, 1974. Coincidentally, this is also the 50th anniversary of ECAI. The WCCCs will be held in beautiful Santiago de Compostela, Spain, October 19-24. Thank you to our generous sponsor, DeepMind.

Sponsorship for ICGA events back in 1990's was minimum $30,000 (thirty thousand dollars). This is 2024 so you can assume inflationary demands will have brought this up to at least 100K dollars, probably more, it is from Deep Mind, after all.

Incidentally, ICGA NEVER publish detailed accounts (something I continually asked them for in the 1990's), they claimed they didn't pay themselves (found out to be not true, when they had to admit they did) and anyway "expenses" which were a principal form of distribution to ICGA officers. Expenses would not count as "payments". Expenses were of the 5-star variant and ran into thousands. Plus ICGA events ran alongside other events such as the Olympiads. Olympiads were under the control of limited companies, and we have no idea what got sent in their direction either. Ray Keene showed me the liquidators report and accounts on an Olympiad LTD Co which went down around 2000. Mind Boggling unpaid debts.

ICGA claims some sort of democratic legitimacy from its members, but when you look at the "democracy" you'll see that they "elect" their president etc at the triannual meeting, which supposedly coincides with the WCC, and participants can vote. BUT, and here's the catch, the president and officer candidates have to be proposed THREE months beforehand, and of course the disparate membership never gets its act together to remember to do this. Thus there's one candidate only and that's how they keep the power (and the control over the tens or hundreds of thousands in sponsorship fees, whenever they hit lucky).

Whether Schaeffer has cleaned up the act I guess remains to be seen.

[smatovic]

[...]
The WCCCs will be held in beautiful Santiago de Compostela, Spain, October 19-24.
Thank you to our generous sponsor, DeepMind.
[...]

Oh now I am keen to see a match Lc0 vs Stockfish (clone/derivative)@WCCC 2024!

--
Srdja

[Ras]

One issue I do see with Shashchess is that it deleted the copyright holders in the source files themselves. E.g. in search.cpp and many others, we read this:

Code: Select all

ShashChess, a UCI chess playing engine derived from Stockfish
Copyright (C) 2004-2024 Andrea Manzo, K.Kiniama and ShashChess developers (see AUTHORS file)

This is clearly a false claim. Andrea cannot claim to hold a copyright that starts in 2004 when Shashchess only even started in 2018, and also certainly not as main copyright holder.

With Shashchess 34.1, that header still was:

Code: Select all

ShashChess, a UCI chess playing engine derived from Stockfish
Copyright (C) 2004-2023 The Stockfish developers (see AUTHORS file)

With Shashchess 35 (2024-Mar-30), that changed:

Code: Select all

ShashChess, a UCI chess playing engine derived from Stockfish
Copyright (C) 2004-2024 Andrea Manzo, K.Kiniama and ShashChess developers (see AUTHORS file)

I don't think this is ill-faithed, but just failing to understand what these copyright notices even mean. Holding the copyright is the legal basis for being able to licence it, in this case under the GPL.

[hgm]

This is 2024 so you can assume inflationary demands will have brought this up to at least 100K dollars, probably more, it is from Deep Mind, after all.

The magnitude of sponsor deals tends to follow interest in the sponsored event rather than inflation. I think it is safe to say that the interest in computer chess has dwindled to almost nothing since Deep Blue beat Kasparov.

[chrisw]

This is 2024 so you can assume inflationary demands will have brought this up to at least 100K dollars, probably more, it is from Deep Mind, after all.

The magnitude of sponsor deals tends to follow interest in the sponsored event rather than inflation. I think it is safe to say that the interest in computer chess has dwindled to almost nothing since Deep Blue beat Kasparov.

Do you sit on academic committees where absolutely nothing ever gets done or decided?

[hgm]

Since I have been living from my investments for a long time I don't really sit in anything. (Not even the Quote 500, unfortunately! ) But when I was still working it was not in a university but in a national lab, and I avoided the executive staff. So I was never is such committees, (if these even exist). We only had committees for making decisions with a deadline anyway (such as which contractor to hire for building a new lab, or deciding which applicants would get next year's grants).

[noobpwnftw]

No wonder. Those guys usually will do anything to get their names on to some work that they didn't do.

[Engin]

[...]
The WCCCs will be held in beautiful Santiago de Compostela, Spain, October 19-24.
Thank you to our generous sponsor, DeepMind.
[...]

Oh now I am keen to see a match Lc0 vs Stockfish (clone/derivative)@WCCC 2024!

--
Srdja

yes, indeed and for me it is forbidden to use SF NNUEs even if i made my own NNUE and use it with probing code from Daniel Shawul, crazy world !

[Peter Berger]

Clearly, the answer is yes for both. I have the mails confirming it.
Andrea

Which is the truth.
The Stockfish mail basically said: "Do as you see fit, we couldn't care less". And so the ICGA did. I think it would be pretty petty to somehow come after Shashchess from Stockfish side after that.

Why do ICGA want any SF to participate in the first place? A walking reminder of their past failure?

Those people never liked anyone outside their circle anyways, not hard to imagine how people this desperate for attention would eventually come together.

noobpwnftw clearly has a very valid point here though. ICGA has always been about these circles according to my personal observations - and there is no consistency in any of their decisions.
I will give two examples (this is from 2004-2006 where it was very clear that entries like Fritz, Shredder and Junior would have given everyone a clear "fuck up" who wanted to look at their source code and I was able to follow some of the discussions in person).
There was the case of "Lion" in Turino 2006, a Fruit derivative. The guys who entered it were absolutely open about what they did (and actually quite proud of it) - and they already stated it in their registration ( so why were they even invited if not OK?) . They weren't part of any in-crowd though, and they also didn't behave in a very gentle and modest way in discussion - they were disqualified.
My personal favourite is still FIBChess, Ramat-Gan 2004, though. I have no idea how the registration process went. But at least by round 3 everyone present knew: the (very nice though not too clever) young Mexican guy who entered this extremely weak engine, that every human operator of the other entries could beat, wasn't the programmer of the engine at all or even somehow involved with its development. He had just downloaded it from the internet and successfully entered it into the tournament for reasons unknown. In this case nobody cared though, and this was kept silent (so this guy got a nice holiday in Israel).
For several years these tournaments have been about free holidays for the ICGA officials, nothing more, nothing less. We get this a final time now.
The modern community will not take part. I can understand. Such a final Shannon trophy might still be something nice for your desktop.

yes, indeed and for me it is forbidden to use SF NNUEs even if i made my own NNUE and use it with probing code from Daniel Shawul, crazy world !

Yes, this doesn't feel too consistent IMHO
Peter