Carotino wrote:@ Rodolfo:
Right, I can not say anything about this. On the other hand, you admit that nowadays it is almost impossible to find a software "chemically pure". Every so often, it turns out that even the most stalwart virgins, have had some minor plastic surgery!
So what do you do? Will agree with me that the current world championship is "slightly" comic... Or the ICGA will decide to renew it and to set aside certain "finesse", or it will implode, with an irreversible process that is already in place.
"Slightly"!?!?? comic- how about "completely useless" or maybe "huge joke".
Don wrote:......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.
I would LOVE it if there were some simple non-intrusive test (like peeing in a cup) that would have caught Vas early on. I would gladly submit to such a test.
Since the ICGA bent over backwards to avoid the "perception" of unfairness and that did not satisfy people, what sort of investigation would you propose that would work? When a program is tested to see if it is a clone of someone else's program, which program does it have to be checked against? Suppose the next program is a clone of Komodo but they check it against Houdini? How will I get satisfaction?
Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
rvida wrote: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
I am not against anarchism, limited and time dependent anarchism can be good to overthrow a rusty system and replace it with something better. This (R3 source code on your HD) goes too far. Receiving stolen goods is as punishable as steeling it yourself. I am getting more sympathy by the hour for our local dino whose views at times I despise but not his intend.
Peter Skinner wrote:
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.
I have lots of reasons to believe Ippolit is derived from R3, I have lots of reasons to believe R1 is not derived from Fruit. One point I will give you, Watkins 2010 document (Ippo vs R3) is not convincing.
Don wrote:......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.
When a program is tested to see if it is a clone of someone else's program, which program does it have to be checked against? Suppose the next program is a clone of Komodo but they check it against Houdini? How will I get satisfaction?
In the Rybka vs Fruit case, there was exhaustive efforts taken prior to the investigation to provide evidence proving that Rybka was a clone of Fruit. I would imagine the same has been done in the new investigations against Thinker and Loop. No doubt someone will have done the same if someone was to RE Komodo and clone it.
So the ICGA would test against the program where evidence was provided before the official investigation got underway.
Peter
I was kicked out of Chapters because I moved all the Bibles to the fiction section.
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
"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 wrote:I would LOVE it if there were some simple non-intrusive test (like peeing in a cup) that would have caught Vas early on. I would gladly submit to such a test.
Since the ICGA bent over backwards to avoid the "perception" of unfairness and that did not satisfy people, what sort of investigation would you propose that would work?
I'm no more than lukewarm on Graham's idea but if I were charged with implementing it a couple competitors chosen at random would have to submit their sources to a judge or two. Judges would not be computer chess programmers but rather programming experts who would familiarize themselves with the top open-source programs. If you were chosen they would look at Komodo's sources to see if they could find any pieces of Ippolit or Stockfish or whatever. They could require a compilation to verify that the sources produced the exe you were playing but they would not be allowed to make any copies of your work. I'd expect the check to take 30 minutes to an hour, not as quick and easy as pissing into a cup but also not terribly painful.
Don wrote:When a program is tested to see if it is a clone of someone else's program, which program does it have to be checked against? Suppose the next program is a clone of Komodo but they check it against Houdini? How will I get satisfaction?
You would still be able to trigger an investigation if you had credible evidence that Komodo was cloned.
Peter Skinner wrote:
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.
What evidence do you have for the claim that the Ippolit->Rybka connection is weaker?
I remember reading that it is clear that the Ippolit code is based on
reverse engineering of something and there is code in it that no human is going to write by himself.
It is not a proof that it is based on rybka but it is a supporting evidence for the Ippolit->Rybka connection because with original program they did not had to do it and Rybka was clearly the top program when they released the source code.
Peter Skinner wrote:
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.
What evidence do you have for the claim that the Ippolit->Rybka connection is weaker?
I can understand his reasoning, if you through Watkins 2010 document you don't get the impression you are dealing with a derivative. This unlike the Rybka-Fruit documents, they look convincing at first glance.
mcostalba wrote:Ok this arrogant and fossilized organization called ICGA really made me get angry and I looked a bit in their site to know a bit more about them. Apart that it really seems "dead and buried", last interesting content is years ago old, I was really impressed by what they call: "World Computer Chess Championship" , the last edition of this farsa was in 2011 and below the list of participants:
On the contrary, every single remark that Marco makes here is *spot on*.
Robert Houdart participates in the programmers forum, and contributes by exchanging ideas. OK he may not be the most active member, but I've never seen a single contribution from the authors of the engines in the above list.
