Dann Corbit wrote:It appears to me that Vas has made some disappointing choices.
However, I suspect that every single person who has ever made a chess program has carefully examined someone else's source and read someone else's article and implemented their own version of it.
Maybe Vas's use was more extensive, but he has been given the death sentence for the same thing that every other chess programmer does.
That is simply, and utterly false. Every other programmer does NOT copy the source from someone else. This has never been about copying ideas, it has been about copying source code.
Simply put, it is necessary to use modern techniques like LMR, Null move, PVS search, etc. I guess further that not a single programmer here has invented all of his evaluation terms, but at least got ideas from other programmers, GMs, etc.
Key word: "ideas". Ideas != source code
An algorithm is not protected by copyright. If you read and understand an algorithm, you can make your own implementation of it. There is nothing wrong with that. I guess that nobody here really understands what that means, considering how people react. Do people really not understand what the definition of an algorithm is?
I also do not think that plagiarism has any bearing on the subject. Vas was not producing a published report, and he also did give credit to both Crafty and Fruit, stating that he had carefully studied them.
Not good enough. If you copy from another article, book, or etc, there is a precise citation rule that must be followed. Vas _explicitly_ stated that he copied _no_ code. And that statement was proven to be completely false.
It does seem to me that he did take excessive liberties, but still I think it is strange to talk about plagiarism for a chess engine binary. Plagiarism is an academic crime.
Simply read the ICGA tournament rules. The author must explicitly list the names of anyone that has source code in the program being entered. This was not done.
I really do not know for sure how much wrongdoing Vas has done, but I think to a large degree he was made a whipping boy for the same sins that all chess programmer commit.
You have made many statements in the past. The above goes to the _BOTTOM_ of the pile in terms of quality. "all chess programmers" do not copy the code of others. That statement is trivial to prove false. I am a chess programmer. I have not copied _any_ code from any other program. This is easy to verify. And it instantly disproves this "all chess programmers copy" nonsense...
Where is this coming from?
Vas created his own set of problems, by himself. The penalty could have been much lighter but he offered no justification for his actions, no circumstances that could be used to reduce the penalties, no nothing...
Shredder was not reverse engineered. Hiarcs was not reverse engineered, Junior was not reverse engineered. Because of Vas' ultimate success he was singled out. Was it petty jealousy?
You already know the answer to this. Vas started this process by claiming that Strelka was a reverse-engineered clone of Rybka. Since Strelka source was released, it was natural that someone would notice that it was quite similar to fruit. This wasn't a witch-hunt at all. It wasn't petty jealousy. It was stupidity.
My whole take on this can (of course) be completely wrong. But I feel deep disappointment on all sides of the argument.
IMO-YMMV