World Computer Chess Championship ?

[Peter Skinner]

Your speculations about Houdini are incorrect.

I'm not going to argue with you Robert. We've been over this countless times.

For the record, are you stating that Houdini is 100% original code? If it does, then by all means prove it and you will be allowed to enter all the tournaments you like.

I appreciate your juicy imagery while celebrating that Houdini 1.5a has now been downloaded over 150,000 times from my web site.
Enjoy your future, more or less irrelevant tournaments with the engines of your choice .

Robert

I think it is great it has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. In fact didn't I just say that I like the competitive environment you have created? That you deserve credit?

Houdini would be welcomed to the CCT's if you would prove it is original. Just this past CCT there was an accusation, I brought it forward, investigated, and it was dismissed.

In fact I asked several authors to send me binaries of their programs and not only did they comply, most included their source. Not a single gripe was made. They simply followed the rules that were set out.

Isn't that the way it should be?

Peter

[Don]

......There is a procedure to determine who the world champion is and there is. It should not be open the cheaters and copiers and it isn't......

How would you know that unless every engine was put under the same scrutiny as the chosen few?

Every engine? The way this works is that there has to be an accusation by one of the authors that someone is plagiarizing their work - in this case it was Fabien who made the accusation. The ICGA did NOT make the accusation.

It's ridiculously impractical for the ICGA to just launch a thorough investigation of every program in every tournament every time, taking a kind of paranoid (McCarthyism) stance that everyone must be guilty.

I don't known how things work in your part of the world but it would be pretty horrible to be around a culture like the one you suggest, that everyone should be investigated just in case they might be doing something wrong.

[Don]

Of course we would never have a ''real'' world champion, but at least, we would have a 100% original world champion.

I don't get this. The Tour de France is not a 'real' Tour de France because doped cyclists are not allowed to participate, and we all know they are way faster than those that ride clean. The Olympics are not 'real' Olympics because doped athletes are banned, and we all know Ben Johnson ran faster than anyone else...

What kind of logic is that?

If clones or derivates are allowed to to partecipate to the chess world championship we would have a ''real'' world champion, where for ''real'' is meant that the world champion is really the strongest engine in the world (clone or not).

That sounds good on paper but the reasoning is badly flawed. Suppose Robert Houdart has 20 different development versions but he doesn't know which version is best? Unless all 20 are allowed to compete then how can we know which engine really is the strongest one? See how silly that is? But based on your (flawed) reasoning that would be perfectly equitable.

Let's assume that most every program is (roughly) about even in strength. Even though that is not the case the principle will be the same. If there are 10 programs then each program would have 1/10 chance of winning the tournament. If you were the only one allowed to bring 2 versions of your program, you would have twice the winning chances of your competitors. That is pretty obviously unfair. So what happens when Ivanhoe, Ippolitto and Robbolito and Firebird are 4 of those 10 programs? The chances that ONE of those 4 will win is actually much higher than ONE program 100 ELO stronger winning.

If we started to play this game then I would have to argue that I should be allowed to not just bring Komodo but several versions of Komodo so that we can "fairly" see which is really the stronger program. If that were not allowed I could just give these various development copies to my friends, they could rename them to something else and even admit that there were branched off of Komodo (but they are different which would be true) and the tournament could not argue with this reasoning or I would just repeat what you said and accuse them of not being interested in seeing which version is really strongest.

So your argument is emotionally appealing but it doesn't really stand up to logic.

This has nothing to do with what is right or wrong, what is legal or not, what is ethical or not.

Take an engine, copy almost all of it, change it in order to make it 50 elo stronger than original...someone could say that is right, legal, ethical but anyway its programmer has a huge advantage to the other 100% original engines' programmers.

In The Tour de France sometimes it's impossible to know who is doped and who's not because everybody knows that doping goes faster than antidoping and today we have cyclers of the past, never banned, who admit to have used doping in the past. Someone is accused to be doped and perhaps he's not. Someone else is not accused of anything and perhaps he's doped.

The same for any other sport.

The question is not ''real or not real'', because, every time that some of all competitors don't partecipate, it's hard to say ''real''.

The question is: how do i know if an engine or an athlete is ok?'' and ''How do i set the rules to allow or not allow an engine/athlete to the competions?''

[Graham Banks]

......There is a procedure to determine who the world champion is and there is. It should not be open the cheaters and copiers and it isn't......

How would you know that unless every engine was put under the same scrutiny as the chosen few?

Every engine? The way this works is that there has to be an accusation by one of the authors that someone is plagiarizing their work - in this case it was Fabien who made the accusation. The ICGA did NOT make the accusation.

It's ridiculously impractical for the ICGA to just launch a thorough investigation of every program in every tournament every time, taking a kind of paranoid (McCarthyism) stance that everyone must be guilty.

I don't known how things work in your part of the world but it would be pretty horrible to be around a culture like the one you suggest, that everyone should be investigated just in case they might be doing something wrong.

Isn't random drug testing like that? Perhaps they should randomly select two participating engines to scrutinise each year, with a rider that it can't be the same engine twice in a three year period.

[Carotino]

It's hard to find an engine entirely copied, it's almost impossible to find an engine partially copied. Another thing: steal ideas is perhaps 'more noble' to steal the code?
What can be the solutions?

Current situation: it works by capturing a guilty of 10, 15 potential 'offenders'.
One, is ruined, the other fourteen are laughing up their sleeves. Or rather, throw stones at the 'chicken' which was captured, in this way, the attention is diverted away from them.

Police regime: all the participants submit one copy of the source code, which will be evaluated by a special committee (the court of the Holy Inquisition)

What else? ...

[Sven]

I was not involved in this illegal RE job you mention. All the information I used for creating Houdini is publicly and freely available to anyone looking for it. The reason Houdini is #1 since 18 months is entirely through my own ideas and improvements, not via any RE of other engines.

Have you ever considered that publishing the result of an illegal RE job (which is how many people think about the creation of Ippolit) might also imply that such information is not "publicly and freely available to anyone" since the original rights owner (which would be Vasik Rajlich in this case) does not lose his rights through the illegal action?

These sources have now effectively become public domain, ALL top engine authors use them: Houdini, Critter, Komodo and even Stockfish (see the latest pawn shelter/storm code)!
There's nothing I can do to revert this situation.

1) There is simply no such thing like "... have effectively become public domain". Why do you believe that the original author's rights have "magically" vanished?

2) From the four top engines you have named there is only one that is massively based on the code of "these sources" (you know which one) while the others have reused some of the ideas and concepts within their fully original implementation. It is quite telling that you pretend not to know the difference.

With your reply to Ed you show the same behaviour as many times before: you avoid to stay on topic when someone mentions a critical issue about your engine, and switch to standard replies instead. The reader of Ed's post, including yourself, saw his statement "the source code you started with is the result of an illegal and punishable RE job", and usually one would have expected a reply close to that specific point but you replied that you were "not involved in this illegal RE job" which is of course a non-topic and turns your whole reply into an empty statement.

I really don't see what it is exactly that you want me to say.
Again:
- The reason Houdini is #1 is because of original work, not because of RE of other engines.

I have been clear enough, and there is not much more to add. You constantly avoid the essential point. I am not talking about any RE done by you.

- The allegedly illegal actions that resulted in these sources do not constitute any justification for the RE of Houdini.

No objection here. But that was neither Ed's nor my topic.

Sven

[mcostalba]

It's hard to find an engine entirely copied, it's almost impossible to find an engine partially copied. Another thing: steal ideas is perhaps 'more noble' to steal the code?
What can be the solutions?

Current situation: it works by capturing a guilty of 10, 15 potential 'offenders'.
One, is ruined, the other fourteen are laughing up their sleeves. Or rather, throw stones at the 'chicken' which was captured, in this way, the attention is diverted away from them.

Police regime: all the participants submit one copy of the source code, which will be evaluated by a special committee (the court of the Holy Inquisition)

What else? ...

Current situation is hypocritical (to say the least), police regime is impractical (and deeply idiotic).

I think before to find "solutions" it is more important to understand the boundary of the issue.

What it means to steal code ? What it means "I have only taken ideas not code" given that copy & paste is in 99,9% of cases techincally impossible and that "to take ideas" in many cases it means to scan at the microscope level the grabbed sources looking for the minimal diffference and quickly (monkey) testing anything seemingly different (and finally asking for hints to the forum when the test result is not what was expected).

What it means "engine is 100% original becuase is closed sourced and has been since forever" (commercials legacy btw) ? Who can assure that between Kid 23 and Kid 24 the 'parents' didn't trash old code and started again with a new one, perhaps preserving evaluation and grabbing just the search ? Just to be clear, I am not making accusation of any kind here, this is just to show that current idea of "original code" is deadly broken and wholly artificial and should be rethinked in a broader and, please let me add, intellectualy honest way.

[Houdini]

Houdini would be welcomed to the CCT's if you would prove it is original.

Somehow you don't seem to understand that at the moment I am genuinely not interested in your tournament. Your comparing Houdini to a turd is not very likely to improve this sentiment.

I would be interested in participating in a tournament similar to the excellent TCEC organized by Martin Thoresen, which had a very well-thought format:
- An intelligent choice of participants to generate maximum interest for the tournament.
- Played on powerful, uniform hardware so that the competition is fair to every engine (no doping!) and doesn't degenerate into a "cluster war".
- With a serious match format. For example first a preliminary double-round RR tournament, followed by a long match (24 to 48 games) between the top 2 participants.
- Played with a fixed opening book or set of starting positions selected for the tournament, so that the competition doesn't generate in an opening book war. For maximum fairness also play every position with reversed colors.
- Transmitted live online 24/7 with possibility of viewers to chat with the engine authors - like was done at Chessbomb for TCEC.

Robert

[mcostalba]

I would be interested in participating in a tournament similar to the excellent TCEC organized by Martin Thoresen, which had a very well-thought format:

I have to second this. I have no interest in partecipating in tournaments (and this surely will not change in the future), but I really enjoyed Martin's one ! At the fun level it was really much more awesome than the traditional ones. The fact that it didn't pretend to attribute void "titles" to the winner, but just fun to the people watching was a big plus !

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

... about RE:

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