This discussion about engine originality has been going on for years now with no acceptable decision and solution found.
I liked a little thing Chris Whittington posted in one of the more technical threads a few days ago ( quote from memory): „Let's keep this discussion slow, so that the lays can follow. Ultimately it's them who decide.“
Of course I am aware of the irony here
, but actually he is absolutely right about this in my opinion.
In the meantime the ICGA tournaments have lost all the credibility they used to have with the chess public in the past. Why? Because of the „known“ clones? If yes, then only in a very roundabout way.
The main problem is that everyone can just download some free engine from the Internet that's most probably stronger than any „world champion“ according to the ICGA.
If you read „New in Chess“ e.g. all the top grandmasters use Houdini or Stockfish for their game comments, and it is obvious that they couldn't care less about the clone discussions or who the world champion is – they care about the quality of the chess analysis they get.
If there was like one or two obvious offenders only - and everony else was absolutely „clean“, you could explain this to the people easily and make them care. E.g. people grudgingly accepted that Ben Johnson was no olympic champion in the 100 meters run as he was doped and you could make them believe the others weren't.
In a similar way you could easily explain to people the case of Gunda ( someone just changing the name of the engine and some strings and claiming it to be his own).
And if someone just blindly copied something relevant verbatim in a most obvious way and this was still kind of unsual in the competitive environment, you can get people to accept that this is cheating.
But the current reality in computerchess land is different. All the „original“ authors seem to cheat too ( at least if you look at it from a layman's point of view). It would be most easy to dig up zillions of messages here of „original“ authors who discuss reverse engineering other engines to find ideas they can implement in their own engines . Some – like the Komodo author – even make progress reports how some idea of someone else kind of works for him and some others don't.
The current situation in computerchess land is basically like the Tour de France IMHO. Everyone knows that like everybody else is doped – and that the only thing that matters is that some cyclist doesn't get caught for him to have a chance to be competitive.
So people stopped to care about the Tour de France.
If you wanted to still have a programmer competition to be credible to the public, you'd probably have to make it „Open Source“with loads of code checks only This might at least work for some time ( it won't work in the long run though - as the ideas happen to be out there).
Or you stop demanding originality ( you will still want to keep some basic rules even the , to avoid too blatant cases of copying but you lower the current demands for „original programs“).
But if say Junior became world champion beating Houdini and Rybka in the tournament, the chess public would care.
It won't if Junior beats Crafty to become world champion.
I see no possibility to work around this problem, as if nothing had happened.
Peter
