ICGA rule #2 / opening books / Diep-Crafty, Turino 2006

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hallo Gerd,

ich meinte, dass nach meinen derzeitigen Informationen deutlich mehr Programmierer nicht unterschrieben haben. Ergänzend, es gibt unterschiedliche Gründe für eine Unterschrift, dass geht aus dem offenen Brief selbst nicht hervor. Auch hier liegen mir schon drei unterschiedliche Gründe von Programmierern vor, die unterschrieben haben.

12 Gründe warum ich den offenen Brief für nicht gut erachte brachte ich ins Forum. Nach der Mitteilung, dass ich darauf hin die SWCR einstelle erhielt ich bislang 152 eMails zu dem Thema und könnte die Liste von 12 auf 17 Gründe die dagegen sprechen erweitern.

Unter den 152 eMails waren auch viele Programmierer.

Grundsätzlich:
Ich kann Programmierer teilweise in diesem Handeln dennoch verstehen, aber es wurde offenbar nicht darüber nachgedacht was alles dagegen spricht. Diese offenen Briefe machen die Situation nicht besser. Wir stehen erst am Anfang bei den Clone-Fragen und die "Offenen Briefe" wirken sehr hilflos.

Interessant ist, dass einige derer, die unterschrieben haben, in der Community für Verwirrung sorgen aber sich dort noch nicht mal dazu äußern. Warum dann ein offener Brief? Kriege anzetteln ist nicht das Mittel um bessere Strukturen zu bewirken.

Dumm an der Sache ist, dass ich selbst vor fast allen, die den offenen Brief unterschrieben, wirklich Respekt habe und meine Unmut daher erst gar nicht zum Ausdruck bringen wollte. Aber dieser zweite offene Brief war nicht überlegt und ich denke nicht jede Handlung sollte hochgelobt werden wenn es dafür die Gründe nicht ausreichen.

152 eMails.
13 von den die mir hierzu geschrieben haben können den Brief nachvollziehen. Der Rest teils oder teils oder deutlich überwiegend ... kann ich nicht nachvollziehen.

Sehr bedenklich wie ich finde!
Die Riege der Programmierer sollte mit solchen Aktionen zukünftig vorsichtiger sein!

Gruß
Frank

[Frank Quisinsky]

Gerd,

übrigens ich diskutiere und schreibe darüber nicht, weil ich eine Möglichkeit suche den "Open Letter" Programmierern in die Karre zu fahren. Ganz im Gegenteil! Ich möchte einfach das gerade zu diesem Thema unnötige Fehler vermieden werden.

Motivation entsteht nicht durch Frust sondern durch Leistung. Die Herren die unterschrieben haben zogen es in der Vergangenheit vor durch Leistung zu überzeugen, es wäre schön wenn es dabei bleibt.

Genug!

Dir ein schönes Wochenende und bei der Gelegenheit vielen Dank für Deine ganzen Bemühungen die _herausragend_ sind !!!

Viele Grüße
Frank

[Gerd Isenberg]

You refer the letter to the CSVN?

Since the signees were former participants the number was restricted anyway.

As already mentioned by Don it was fair towards the CSVN to declare the boycott rather than only to don't silently participiate. To make their current direction aware of their decision to don't ban Rybka from their tournaments. Their reasoning was flawed and wrong. They wondered why programmers took 5 years to change their mind, and on the other side did not mention Ed's change of mind within five weeks, using him as primary advocat for their pro Rybka decision.

I guess your mail statistics from all your fans does not reflect a meaningfull measure

[Frank Quisinsky]

Hi Gerd,

yes, my point of view only against the letter to CSVN. I think the first open letter to ICGA is right and the decision from ICGA for the most reasons is right too. But this is my personal opinion only. I think one open letter is more as enough.

Right what you wrote to the mail statistics.
But many of the open letters programmers develops commercials engines. The damage produced by the second open letter is high. Many users are thinking on "Helplessness" and prefer free available and strong engines.

That isn't in my interest because both are important.
Commercial chess and freeware developments!

Commercial programmers should concentrate on the own developments and not on the works others do.

Best
Frank

[Gerd Isenberg]

Gerd,

übrigens ich diskutiere und schreibe darüber nicht, weil ich eine Möglichkeit suche den "Open Letter" Programmierern in die Karre zu fahren. Ganz im Gegenteil! Ich möchte einfach das gerade zu diesem Thema unnötige Fehler vermieden werden.

Motivation entsteht nicht durch Frust sondern durch Leistung. Die Herren die unterschrieben haben zogen es in der Vergangenheit vor durch Leistung zu überzeugen, es wäre schön wenn es dabei bleibt.

Genug!

Dir ein schönes Wochenende und bei der Gelegenheit vielen Dank für Deine ganzen Bemühungen die _herausragend_ sind !!!

Viele Grüße
Frank

many thanks to you as well.

Best regards,
Gerd

[jdart]

But books have been "free" for years. At one point, Ken Thompson did the typesetting for David's volume on the Dragon, and David gave Ken permission to use all of that analysis (many many games) in Ken's opening book. Bert Gower and I personally hand-typed MCO-10, MCO-11, and big parts of ECO to create the book for Cray Blitz. The only rule that has been used in recent years is that no single "book author" can provide an opening book for more than one program. The source of the opening book material has never been discussed...

I believe games from public events are not subject to copyright. Authors of opening books and game databases can and do however claim copyright over their material. The former can be copyrighted because of original analysis and the latter as a collection (US law has recognized that the effort of assembling, correcting and maintaining a large database can qualify a work for copyright).

Therefore re-assembling published material into an opening book may be improper, but to my knowledge no one in the computer chess field has ever run into trouble in this way (and practically everyone does it). Things are also a bit different today because practically every opening innovation almost immediately appears and re-appears in games, especially on playchess and the like.

[bob]

[quote="bob"Rule 2 is about program code, not the book. In fact, I am not sure where that analysis came from. But books have been "free" for years. At one point, Ken Thompson did the typesetting for David's volume on the Dragon, and David gave Ken permission to use all of that analysis (many many games) in Ken's opening book. Bert Gower and I personally hand-typed MCO-10, MCO-11, and big parts of ECO to create the book for Cray Blitz. The only rule that has been used in recent years is that no single "book author" can provide an opening book for more than one program. The source of the opening book material has never been discussed...

But this rule is so arbitrary. Let's face it – if engines had been switched between Diep and you before the game started the result of this tournament game would have been exactly the other way round – that's way worse than a shared piece-square table in engines – it is deterministic ( if this is a word). And this was supposed to be about artifical intelligence ..[/quote]

That's not a "given". Nothing says Crafty would have played that same opening from the other side, and in fact, most likely would not have. And then there is always a bit of randomness unless a book line only has one option...

During the three years I somehow „participated“ I got the clear impression that the WCCC is simply some kind of social event ( a very nice one I might add).

That is a part of its function. It also is done to create interest, since at times in the past, these events have been public spectacles with lots of publicity. It is also done to let the authors compete with each other (although we now do this much more regularly over the internet, of course) while, at the same time, discussing ideas and such.

The tournament director Jaap just has no clue of course ( no idea *what* he has a clue of btw :p) , but all the participants know this very well.

And tournament rules get violated right and left – I give the three most blatant examples that come to my mind instantly:

1.) Crafty-Shredder, Ramat-Gan 2004, Rd. 1

At about move 40 in a dead drawn position after a very nice game so far Crafty crashed ( you may remember as you fixed the bug before the next round). I tried to set this position back up according to the tournament rules, but as this was a real bug, this was simply impossible without Crafty crashing again.

On the other side of the board sat a determined Stephan Meyer-Kahlen, watching my efforts with interest.

The 15 minutes deadline was approaching fastly. ( too lazy to check if I remember the 15 minute thing correctly, but you guys will know the correct amount of minutes). Of course Stephan and me knew back then ( Jaap, who knows what he knows .. )

Finally I decided to simply try and set up the position without history ( a clear violation of rules, and I saw in Stephan's face that he knew very well) . And even if this fact were ignored , it actually just took too long.

Now I was Mr. Unknown nice guy interested in computerchess and clearly desperate in this situation operating Crafty in such a major event for the very first time, so he decided to let it go ( which might have cost him the title btw!!) – after the game was finally running again it ended in a quick draw of course.

This has happened many times in the past. Just for the record, however, not entering the "history" is not a rule violation. Most use FEN to set up a position on a restart, unless they save the moves. But for the most part, most of "us" have always considered this as a contest between the two programs, with the operators used as "I/O peripherals" only. What you and SMK did I have done several times in the past. As have others.

2.) FIBChess 2004

This was maybe one of the funniest things I ever experienced in computerchess world. FIBChess was no real competitor at all. Some Mexican(?) guy had just downloaded a very weak engine ( TSCP-like) by a Spanish original author he somehow knew personally and took it to apply for the WCCC event in Israel without the knowledge of the engine author ( btw getting all the bonusses offered back then, like travel expenses, hotel costs ..) ..
This was discovered during the event. But as it would have been extremley embarassing if ever found out by the public, it never made any news. The guy just got a nice free holidays .

3.) Junior- Crafty – Blitz event 2005

I am not 100% sure about the year, but I think I got it right. Amir Ban operated and made a operator mistake making the wrong move on the actual physical chessboard. Jaap was standing next by. I let him take it back.

I believe that is exactly according to the rules. Any operator mistake MUST be corrected as soon as it is detected, even if the game has to back up many moves.

I have no problem to understand how all the cloning discussions are very important – but ICGA-wise - they really have no standards anyway IMHO.

Peter

I think the standard has always been (a) program vs program is the important part and (b) each program must be original, to prevent multiple copies of the same one from participating.

[BubbaTough]

But books have been "free" for years. At one point, Ken Thompson did the typesetting for David's volume on the Dragon, and David gave Ken permission to use all of that analysis (many many games) in Ken's opening book. Bert Gower and I personally hand-typed MCO-10, MCO-11, and big parts of ECO to create the book for Cray Blitz. The only rule that has been used in recent years is that no single "book author" can provide an opening book for more than one program. The source of the opening book material has never been discussed...

I believe games from public events are not subject to copyright. Authors of opening books and game databases can and do however claim copyright over their material. The former can be copyrighted because of original analysis and the latter as a collection (US law has recognized that the effort of assembling, correcting and maintaining a large database can qualify a work for copyright).

Therefore re-assembling published material into an opening book may be improper, but to my knowledge no one in the computer chess field has ever run into trouble in this way (and practically everyone does it). Things are also a bit different today because practically every opening innovation almost immediately appears and re-appears in games, especially on playchess and the like.

I have a few friends that write chess books, and they are at least as annoyed with material poaching as our community is with code reuse (and while it is not exactly big money, there certainly are a lot more people that make a living writing chess books than writing chess programs, so its kind of important to resolve). Unfortunately, they are no closer than we are to having an agreement, let alone an enforceable agreement, on how much "borrowing" is OK without citing, how much requires citing, and how much is just wrong and possibly illegal. In my opinion its just one of those gray areas that is likely to never be resolved satisfactorily.

-Sam

[bob]

But books have been "free" for years. At one point, Ken Thompson did the typesetting for David's volume on the Dragon, and David gave Ken permission to use all of that analysis (many many games) in Ken's opening book. Bert Gower and I personally hand-typed MCO-10, MCO-11, and big parts of ECO to create the book for Cray Blitz. The only rule that has been used in recent years is that no single "book author" can provide an opening book for more than one program. The source of the opening book material has never been discussed...

I believe games from public events are not subject to copyright. Authors of opening books and game databases can and do however claim copyright over their material. The former can be copyrighted because of original analysis and the latter as a collection (US law has recognized that the effort of assembling, correcting and maintaining a large database can qualify a work for copyright).

Therefore re-assembling published material into an opening book may be improper, but to my knowledge no one in the computer chess field has ever run into trouble in this way (and practically everyone does it). Things are also a bit different today because practically every opening innovation almost immediately appears and re-appears in games, especially on playchess and the like.

The problem is that games are not individually copyrightable, but a collection of games is. Such as what was in David's various books on the Dragon. But we did not copy and distribute, we "copied and used" and did not give anything away (for example, we did not provide any comments, annotations, and such, just raw PGN we hand-typed for each opening line in the book(s)...

[bob]

But books have been "free" for years. At one point, Ken Thompson did the typesetting for David's volume on the Dragon, and David gave Ken permission to use all of that analysis (many many games) in Ken's opening book. Bert Gower and I personally hand-typed MCO-10, MCO-11, and big parts of ECO to create the book for Cray Blitz. The only rule that has been used in recent years is that no single "book author" can provide an opening book for more than one program. The source of the opening book material has never been discussed...

I believe games from public events are not subject to copyright. Authors of opening books and game databases can and do however claim copyright over their material. The former can be copyrighted because of original analysis and the latter as a collection (US law has recognized that the effort of assembling, correcting and maintaining a large database can qualify a work for copyright).

Therefore re-assembling published material into an opening book may be improper, but to my knowledge no one in the computer chess field has ever run into trouble in this way (and practically everyone does it). Things are also a bit different today because practically every opening innovation almost immediately appears and re-appears in games, especially on playchess and the like.

I have a few friends that write chess books, and they are at least as annoyed with material poaching as our community is with code reuse (and while it is not exactly big money, there certainly are a lot more people that make a living writing chess books than writing chess programs, so its kind of important to resolve). Unfortunately, they are no closer than we are to having an agreement, let alone an enforceable agreement, on how much "borrowing" is OK without citing, how much requires citing, and how much is just wrong and possibly illegal. In my opinion its just one of those gray areas that is likely to never be resolved satisfactorily.

-Sam

I believe this is one of those things that should never be "over-specified". If so, you introduce an "instant technicality". If you say 50% is too much, then 49.999% is not, yet for some book, that might be the critical part. I think the normal legal system is the right way. One group (the legislature in the US) makes the laws, the courts interpret and apply them. But they apply them on a case-by-case basis...