World Computer Chess Championship ?

[Laskos]

LOL

Not only funny, misplaced and badly chosen analogy with Bolt, but a continuous silly, wrong argumentation. The CCT, WCCC and similar crap "tourneys" defenders need some medical attention, really, are you sick about your useless "tourneys"?. Re-read your statement: because one engine would run 10% slower on a particular hardware (and not exactly equal, as you would desire), it's much fairer to have participants having 30000% advantage.

Kai

And you realize that if you want an equal hardware/book tournament, you essentially have a rating list with massive error margins due to lack of game, right?

Rating list:

1. Equal hardware
2. Equal book
3. Games to support who is #1.
4. Reduced error margins

Your proposed tournament:

1. Equal hardware
2. Equal book
3. Games to support who is #1

There are what.. 6 rating lists quoted on this forum?

Do you not see the flawed logic behind a COMPETITION where you want everything to be equal?

Someone better call the organizers over at London 2012 and tell them to scrap the Olympics. No one wants to see a COMPETITION where everything is used to attain a WIN. They want everyone to come first..

Peter

I stated in an earlier post the issue with reduced number of games (about a dozen in WCCC and CCT). The analogy with sports is generally misplaced, usually if only luck or the kind of snickers used by athletes determines the champion, the competition is borderline or not at all in athletics or other sports.

And YES, ICGA should start testing engines and publish rating lists like FIDE does, and for the WCCC prize do a 40-games match between finalists like TCEC.

Kai

[Peter Skinner]

And YES, ICGA should start testing engines and publish rating lists like FIDE does, and for the WCCC prize do a 40-games match between finalists like TCEC.

Kai

I think there should be a series of tournaments that culminate in a rating system, kind of like a contender series where the #1 and #2 engine after the series square off in a 40 game match to crown the winner of the WCCC.

Once the first one is complete, there is another "contenders" tournament, and the winner of that faces the WCCC from the previous one, just like in human chess.

If engine #1 retains the crown year after year, it is likely the strongest available program. THAT would be something to market for commercial authors.

Just because it wins this year, doesn't mean it will win the next match if the competition improves dramatically over the current Champion. It would also remove the luck factor from the title as well. You might get lucky in a game, but not over a series of games.

Peter

[Don]

Yawn.
How many times do I need to repeat that Houdini is original at the source code level, and doesn't contain any licensed code other than the Gaviota and Nalimov EGTB code?
If you search the forum (and/or the Rybka forum) you'll find several occurrences of my saying so.
My current reply will certainly not stop you from asking the same kind of question in 6 months time, pretend I never answered it, and then make big statements about "speaking volumes"...

Robert

Ok so it includes "public domain" code, and was not 100% originally written by yourself. Thank you for your answer.

Peter

Peter,

You did not read his reply carefully. He did not say that Houdini is original. He said that "Houdini is original at the source code level." You can take a program written in Pascal, make a direct translation to C and be able to make this claim even if you have a functionally identical program. Here is an example using pure C:

// add all the numbers from 0 to 99
int x = 0;
int y = 0;
for (x = 0; x < 100; x++) y += x;


Now here is a program that is functionally identical but is "completely different" at the source code level:

sum ^= sum; // clear sum
int i = 99;
while (i > 0) { sum = sum + i ; i-- }

Roberts statement is more or less completely true. He made massive changes at the "source code level" - for example he completely rewrote Ivanhoe's move generator to gain a small speedup. Essentially he applied a lot of optimization's to the EXISTING algorithms. You cannot pin him down on this because he also made actual improvements to Houdini other than mundane optimization's, enough to convince (at least himself) that he is a real programming and just a cleanup boy. It's the difference between being an actual engineer who designs engines for high performance vehicles versus being a mechanic at a garage who specializes in modifying these engines to perform better with bolt on parts and machine work.

There are people who say the first Houdini is not even a translation, just the original Robolito code with a few changes of his own. There have been dumps that supposedly prove that but I have not seen them with my own eyes. But what ANYONE can see with their own eyes is the experiment on an early version of Houdnii where every move of a 1 ply search matches one of the Robbo versions. Not just most but EVERY single move selected from random positions. It's undeniable proof of how this program was engineered and even MORE so when combined with the scores generated from these one ply searches - which are identical after scaling. He probably believed that multiplying the scores by some constant would fool people or else he did it for performance reasons - when you do a deeper search programs behave different even when scaled identically because it automatically changes the meaning of the margins used.

So it doesn't matter what Robert says and getting him to make a statement just so that we can marvel at his ingenuity in evading the truth is not going to get you anywhere.

But I don't want people to be misled by his statements so I wanted to make sure it got straightened out. He did not lie here, he just evaded.


"It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair

[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.

They could do something like that, but I don't believe it would come out the way you think it would. By your implication you may have bought in to the argument that everyone is guilty but only a couple of people got caught. The computer chess community is pretty sharp and it's almost impossible to get away with this for very long. To underscore this principle the players in the online chess club can tell pretty quickly if you are using a computer to cheat and you will get flagged.

But this is a lot like life, we generally wait for an accusation before launching investigations and it's usually up the victim to take some interest in the process even though that is usually not a hard and fast requirement. In a scenario like you describe the victim could be every competitor in the tournament but I believe there should at least be a viable complaint of some kind before launching investigations, otherwise the ICGA becomes the oppressive tyrannical organization that a few extremists are accusing them of.

I don't think that all are guilty by any means Don. I'm interested in the perception of fairness, that the perception of some programmers being above scrutiny is got rid of.
By doing random drug tests, do we automatically assume that all competitors are guilty?

[Peter Skinner]

Peter,

You did not read his reply carefully. He did not say that Houdini is original. He said that "Houdini is original at the source code level." You can take a program written in Pascal, make a direct translation to C and be able to make this claim even if you have a functionally identical program. Here is an example using pure C:

// add all the numbers from 0 to 99
int x = 0;
int y = 0;
for (x = 0; x < 100; x++) y += x;


Now here is a program that is functionally identical but is "completely different" at the source code level:

sum ^= sum; // clear sum
int i = 99;
while (i > 0) { sum = sum + i ; i-- }

Roberts statement is more or less completely true. He made massive changes at the "source code level" - for example he completely rewrote Ivanhoe's move generator to gain a small speedup. Essentially he applied a lot of optimization's to the EXISTING algorithms. You cannot pin him down on this because he also made actual improvements to Houdini other than mundane optimization's, enough to convince (at least himself) that he is a real programming and just a cleanup boy. It's the difference between being an actual engineer who designs engines for high performance vehicles versus being a mechanic at a garage who specializes in modifying these engines to perform better with bolt on parts and machine work.

There are people who say the first Houdini is not even a translation, just the original Robolito code with a few changes of his own. There have been dumps that supposedly prove that but I have not seen them with my own eyes. But what ANYONE can see with their own eyes is the experiment on an early version of Houdnii where every move of a 1 ply search matches one of the Robbo versions. Not just most but EVERY single move selected from random positions. It's undeniable proof of how this program was engineered and even MORE so when combined with the scores generated from these one ply searches - which are identical after scaling. He probably believed that multiplying the scores by some constant would fool people or else he did it for performance reasons - when you do a deeper search programs behave different even when scaled identically because it automatically changes the meaning of the margins used.

So it doesn't matter what Robert says and getting him to make a statement just so that we can marvel at his ingenuity in evading the truth is not going to get you anywhere.

But I don't want people to be misled by his statements so I wanted to make sure it got straightened out. He did not lie here, he just evaded.

"It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair

Then my original statement is true, being, that without the source code to Ivanhoe/Ippolit/Robolitto, Robert would not have created an entity as strong as Houdini.

He took the code, re-wrote it, optimized it, compiled and released it. Sure he has added to the program, but the basis of the program came from the Ippolit source. Houdini is not something he started from scratch to create, and is a derivative of the Ippolit source, not a copy.

Thanks for clearing up the evasion by Robert, as obviously he still wants people to believe he wrote it from scratch.

Peter

[Uri Blass]

Peter,

You did not read his reply carefully. He did not say that Houdini is original. He said that "Houdini is original at the source code level." You can take a program written in Pascal, make a direct translation to C and be able to make this claim even if you have a functionally identical program. Here is an example using pure C:

// add all the numbers from 0 to 99
int x = 0;
int y = 0;
for (x = 0; x < 100; x++) y += x;


Now here is a program that is functionally identical but is "completely different" at the source code level:

sum ^= sum; // clear sum
int i = 99;
while (i > 0) { sum = sum + i ; i-- }

Roberts statement is more or less completely true. He made massive changes at the "source code level" - for example he completely rewrote Ivanhoe's move generator to gain a small speedup. Essentially he applied a lot of optimization's to the EXISTING algorithms. You cannot pin him down on this because he also made actual improvements to Houdini other than mundane optimization's, enough to convince (at least himself) that he is a real programming and just a cleanup boy. It's the difference between being an actual engineer who designs engines for high performance vehicles versus being a mechanic at a garage who specializes in modifying these engines to perform better with bolt on parts and machine work.

There are people who say the first Houdini is not even a translation, just the original Robolito code with a few changes of his own. There have been dumps that supposedly prove that but I have not seen them with my own eyes. But what ANYONE can see with their own eyes is the experiment on an early version of Houdnii where every move of a 1 ply search matches one of the Robbo versions. Not just most but EVERY single move selected from random positions. It's undeniable proof of how this program was engineered and even MORE so when combined with the scores generated from these one ply searches - which are identical after scaling. He probably believed that multiplying the scores by some constant would fool people or else he did it for performance reasons - when you do a deeper search programs behave different even when scaled identically because it automatically changes the meaning of the margins used.

So it doesn't matter what Robert says and getting him to make a statement just so that we can marvel at his ingenuity in evading the truth is not going to get you anywhere.

But I don't want people to be misled by his statements so I wanted to make sure it got straightened out. He did not lie here, he just evaded.

"It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is." –Bill Clinton, during his 1998 grand jury testimony on the Monica Lewinsky affair

Then my original statement is true, being, that without the source code to Ivanhoe/Ippolit/Robolitto, Robert would not have created an entity as strong as Houdini.

Robert admit this part directly in his site so he never tried to hide it

http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm

"Acknowledgements
An invaluable resource for any chess engine author is the excellent Chess Programming Wiki.
Without many ideas and techniques from the open source chess engines Ippolit and Stockfish, Houdini would not nearly be as strong as it is now."

Edit:Note that
I will not be surprised if it is correct for all top engines.

[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.

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.

They could do something like that, but I don't believe it would come out the way you think it would. By your implication you may have bought in to the argument that everyone is guilty but only a couple of people got caught. The computer chess community is pretty sharp and it's almost impossible to get away with this for very long. To underscore this principle the players in the online chess club can tell pretty quickly if you are using a computer to cheat and you will get flagged.

But this is a lot like life, we generally wait for an accusation before launching investigations and it's usually up the victim to take some interest in the process even though that is usually not a hard and fast requirement. In a scenario like you describe the victim could be every competitor in the tournament but I believe there should at least be a viable complaint of some kind before launching investigations, otherwise the ICGA becomes the oppressive tyrannical organization that a few extremists are accusing them of.

I don't think that all are guilty by any means Don. I'm interested in the perception of fairness, that the perception of some programmers being above scrutiny is got rid of.
By doing random drug tests, do we automatically assume that all competitors are guilty?

If they did such a thing there would be a huge outrage. To see what I mean, would you be willing to submit to a stressful IRS audit (or the equivalent for your country?) Even though you may be 100% honest that is not something you want.

If they did initiate such a check, I would submit to it even though I think it's a terrible idea. If you somehow believe that would improve participation in these events, I think you need to get your head screwed back on

I actually believe it should go in the OTHER direction. I don't really know the details of how the ICGA works with respect to allegations and I doubt it's an exact science, but there should never be an investigation without their first being an allegation and any allegation should be backed up with some supporting evidence before a full scale investigation is launched. But it still comes down to their rules which they have the right to set and I have a lot of confidence in their sense of fairness.

I know that a few of you disagree with Fabien's right to having some kind of recourse on this and I just don't understand this at all.

[rvida]

Rybka3 - I never looked into the binary. I have R3 equivalent source code from Yuri O.

With or without Vas permission ?

I don't think I need someone's permission to receive an email with an attachment

[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.

They could do something like that, but I don't believe it would come out the way you think it would. By your implication you may have bought in to the argument that everyone is guilty but only a couple of people got caught. The computer chess community is pretty sharp and it's almost impossible to get away with this for very long. To underscore this principle the players in the online chess club can tell pretty quickly if you are using a computer to cheat and you will get flagged.

But this is a lot like life, we generally wait for an accusation before launching investigations and it's usually up the victim to take some interest in the process even though that is usually not a hard and fast requirement. In a scenario like you describe the victim could be every competitor in the tournament but I believe there should at least be a viable complaint of some kind before launching investigations, otherwise the ICGA becomes the oppressive tyrannical organization that a few extremists are accusing them of.

I don't think that all are guilty by any means Don. I'm interested in the perception of fairness, that the perception of some programmers being above scrutiny is got rid of.
By doing random drug tests, do we automatically assume that all competitors are guilty?

If they did such a thing there would be a huge outrage. To see what I mean, would you be willing to submit to a stressful IRS audit (or the equivalent for your country?) Even though you may be 100% honest that is not something you want.

If they did initiate such a check, I would submit to it even though I think it's a terrible idea. If you somehow believe that would improve participation in these events, I think you need to get your head screwed back on

I actually believe it should go in the OTHER direction. I don't really know the details of how the ICGA works with respect to allegations and I doubt it's an exact science, but there should never be an investigation without their first being an allegation and any allegation should be backed up with some supporting evidence before a full scale investigation is launched. But it still comes down to their rules which they have the right to set and I have a lot of confidence in their sense of fairness.

I know that a few of you disagree with Fabien's right to having some kind of recourse on this and I just don't understand this at all.

It has nothing to do with what I see as wrong or right. It's about perceived fairness.
I take it that you think that random drug testing is an appalling thing too, because as I see it, my suggestion is the computer chess equivalent.

[rvida]

I believe what most are trying to get across here is Houdini wouldn't exist without the initial RE of Rybka.

I assume you are implying here the Ippolit->Rybka connection.

This is in a way correct, but only indirectly.

Some people here are worshiping a mantra (Ed Schroeder comes to mind) that Ippolit is no more than a leaked/hacked source code of Rybka3. Things would be very simple if that would be the case. Alas, this is not entirely true. While I am pretty sure that the author(s) of Ippolit did a "comprehensive read" of the R3 binary, their engine was indeed written from scratch and the differences are too many to call it a clone. Especially, if someone is in doubt about the ICGA verdict in Fruit->Rybka case, the Rybka->Ippolit case looks quite innocent in comparison.

Unfortunately much of the CC people are doomed to stuck to their beliefs and hype, because not everyone can read disassembled code

Are you a proponent to declare Ippolit as an original engine?

I am not. I just think you are using double meter here. You strongly oppose the claims that Vasik copied parts of Fruit, yet you condemn Ippolit author(s) without any substantial proof. Apart from some similarities at the _idea_ level, the Ippolit->Rybka connection is much weaker than that of Rybka->Fruit.