I'm not 100% sure but I might have asked this before
Let's say I built a cluster that generates billions of fens for creating a neural net. I setup and created a database for this, wrote software to talk to the chess program, created software that allows multiple computers over the internet produce the fen-strings, made the software that filters out the unrelevant fens (opening, check, etc) and dumps all of that into a large file that can be postprocessed into a weights-file by 'bullet'. Now the chess-program I want to use is stockfish as it reaches great depths in little time.
Is this cheating? Because the databse I did not write myself (mariadb), the chess-engine I did not write myself and neither the software to combine the fens into a weights-file. On the other hand I would've created all infrastructure etc etc to do all of this.
What do you think?
Please note that for Dog, I used fen-strings generated by Dog itself as that was more convenient at that point in time (full control over input and output).