chrisw wrote: ↑Wed Aug 15, 2018 9:19 pm
syzygy wrote: So my point is that the set of weights will be just as (un)copyrighted as the equivalent source or object code. The extra mechanical transformation (the "direct map") makes no difference.
Yes, I agreed with you earlier and switched to:
Chrisw wrote: Agreed. For this particular ingenious machine, the key step is the process "transformation of input game database into a probe-able knowledge engine", it wasn't possible to probe the database for this "knowledge", but it is possible to probe its transformation, or whatever you want to call it.
as the creative and potentially copyright giving step.
Yes, I see now. I skipped a paragraph I shouldn't have skipped.
OK, then I'd say the transformation is still mechanical and irreversible. Since it is mechanical, no copyrightable elements are added. Since it is irreversible, some copyrightable elements might be lost. (In view of section 178, UK copyright law seems to accept that (non-trivial) mechanical transformations can in theory add copyrightable elements, though.)
And I think what normally, if not always, will happen is that everything copyrightable about the initial set of games will be lost.
But I might be able to come up with an exception. The game of chess itself, as a set of game rules, is probably copyrightable (were it not that the rules of chess are in the public domain). Suppose you start with an uninitialised NN for playing a turn-based two-person board game, where the NN does not have any hard-coded game rules because of how the inputs are connected. Now you (creatively) come up with a set of game rules, generate a large amount of games adhering to those game rules, and train the network on those games.
If you play the resulting NN, you will probably be able to recognise some of the game rules (even though the NN might not have acquired the rules with 100% accuracy). So some of the creativity that went into coming up with the game rules will have been retained in the NN weights.
Going back to Lc0, something similar might be possible. Select training games having some silly pattern not connected to the rules of chess and hope you can find back that pattern in the games played by the resulting NN (showing that the NN has some observable creative characteristic created by the person selecting the training games). This does not seem to be easy to achieve, but may not be completely impossible.