At least half of the panel members have never competed against Rybka at the WCCC or a similar event.Dann Corbit wrote: The "jury of his peers" consisted of his opponents.
That doesn't matter. Reading source code is one obvious way to find out what a program does, but there are other ways. Several versions of Rybka were reverse-engineered to understand their behaviour and compare it to other programs such as Crafty and Fruit 2.1. The sources of Strelka were also available, and in all of the parts I looked at, were a very close match with the behaviour of the disassembled Rybka code.Dann Corbit wrote: They simply do not have his source code.
Anyway, Fruit 2.1's eval was a pretty close match with Rybka 1.0 Beta. Its one thing to borrow an idea or two and implement them in your own program. But its a very different thing to take the entire eval from Fruit 2.1, port it to a bitboard representation, and call it your own. That appears to be what Vas did. (And he ignored the many opportunities that were given to him, to comment on or correct this perception of the panel's, if he believed it to be inaccurate).
But where does the "algorithm" end, and the "implementation" begin? If his eval has nearly the exact same eval features, in the same order, and (in the early versions at least) even with the same score weights... its hard to say that only an "idea" has been copied.Dann Corbit wrote: If the algorithm Vas wrote was the same, there is nothing wrong with that. It is the implementation and not the algorithm that is protected. I simply do not believe that what is claimed to have been proven has been proven.
I'm not actually claiming that he literally copy-and-pasted code from Fruit 2.1 into his program. Here is what I believe: I think he translated it into bitboard format, and probably typed it in with his own naming conventions and style and so on. Regardless, the result is still "derived" from Fruit 2.1. It probably took him a day or two, maybe longer -- but if he had truly made an original eval from scratch, it would have probably taken months of experimentation and hard work to produce an eval of that quality. Instead, it looks as if Vas skipped all of that effort by just copying what Fabien had done. He then claimed it was his original work, and gave evasive answers when asked about the similarity.