We shall see.

A new subforum for clonetalk? An excellent idea, to tidy things up Is it allowed to mention Rybka in there? Does one have to make 500 posts to get in or does one have to be invited I think it is being a bit provocative what Ed schröder writes in OpenChess but of course there is the possibility that Crafty 23.4 is behaving more like Rybka and its clones than previous and weaker versions just because weaker code was tested to not bring elopoints and got stripped out of Crafty. There is of course already Rybka stuff in Crafty but that is because with more than 90% probability present_day Rybka is still a Crafty clone.... So this is inevitable. Larry Kaufman allegedly mentioned in an e-mail to an internet journalist that 'for all practical purposes' Rybka 3 is a complete rewrite and no longer should be seen as a clone, many programmers may dispute this and Vas has not made any claims or given any evidence to support this himself. So as yet this is still an open issue.

We are still talking about copying code which is not allowed, not copying ideas which is allowed.

There is another open issue that for the sake of some provocation, à la Ed, can be mentioned. With Rybka stripped of some ICGA titles, I have not checked but I believe Loop got the one in 2007 but is under suspicion itself, and is not one of the runners up in 2007, or one of the years after, Junior, by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky? In the very beginning, Junior started as Gnuchess which is a GPL based program. If all programs are only partial rewrites of previous versions until proven otherwise, does Junior not have to provide proof it is no longer using GPL licensed code. I mean, while we are at it, it is better to get this out in the open before we are ten years further down the road. If the ICGA still exists in ten years of course...

Eelco

>Evil Dr Bob? Do you think so, or do you jest?

What? You never saw the movies made about Bob Hyatt?

============================
Code and Let Die

Coderaker

Code is Forever

From UAB with Love

Dr. Bob

Codefinger

For Your Engine Only

Thundercode

The Programmer Who Loved Me

On Her Majesty's Secret Programmer Service

You Only Code Twice

The Man with the Golden Code

Octacode

Never Say Code Again

License to Code

Code Never Dies

Their Code is not Enough

Golden Code

Code Another Day

Quantum Code

Place Watchman on Ignore -it works wonders! It's like taking out the trash!

What a shame in the ICGA decision

Male, scientific/logical persons tend to show lower empathy than average - the danger, I think, is that computer chess citizens may tend to show a collective psychopathy and perhaps the current affair demonstrates that to some extent.

let me thank CW and Ed but also Dann for their honesty and loyalty. I agree with this psychopathy scale, whatever that may be. Still I have my personal and logical reasons to show contempt for the programmers on the panel who voted against Vas, I just read some of Hyatt's arguments in the OpenForum and now also some Muller here. Of course I cant judge on the many tech details but if already the overall in general is a flaw why should I study the details that are irrelevant? This isnt a murder trial with certain evidence, it's more like a medieval witch-hunt. I cant praise Vas highly enough for his stamina to withdraw from all debates with guys like David Levy. Note well that this is all about Rybka 1beta from 2005, but now we have 2011.

Ok, ok, but why I am so certain that Vas is ok and the bunch of lower rated programmers are not? But let me first show you the main culprit who spoiled the whole innocence of computerchess in the actual situation.

1) Chrilly Donninger. Although he showed in the end that Rybka wasnt a copy in a specific point, he was the one who began the witch-hunt. Basically his example opened the hunt so that all others were invited to follow. Nobody except me if I recall this right opposed his attitude to break into the secrets of the new engine and then talked about his resiults in public. Many argued that the RE were absolutely normal and everybody could do it, yes, but then they wouldnt spread results in public. That was the evil news back then in late 2005 I think.
Already Chrilly violated the ethics of a decent survey by NOT examining others as if Vas were the only one to do some potential wrong. That was the trick right from the beginning.

2) Christophe Theron. He brought the unfairness into the game by insinuating some ethical/moral wrong doing by his claim, if he would have such a lack of moral then his Tiger would also be a potential Champion... That is an evil thesis because you cannot defend against such a supposition. It just spoils the air for our sanity. Like Donninger Theron chose Vas resp his program as if everyone else would be water tight examined against any possible doubts of honesty. But until this very moment right now this never has been proven! So that is another judicial bias or wrong.

3) Bob Hyatt Ridiculous that a university professor who has a chess program open source as a hobby and money from the institutions but not any market or sports became the technical director of the witchhunt. His trick is to prevent that Crafty becomes World's number one because then people from all over the world would stop to send in their ideas and propositions and codes. I could never have forseen that a professor would damage the sports champion which brought him also the basis for a small ranged living which is not more like peanuts in view of the possible income of industrial business possibilities.

I sum up.

In a hobby/sport where all entries are doing what they want with only seldom examinations it's about becoming the winner. that was the case with DeepBlue and now with Rybka. It's all about cleverness in finding new tricks of course on the base of the past findings from many former programmers. Since almost 90% of the tech is taken from prior experiences it's only about few novelties. Read Corbit who explains that on differently high levels your program must have certain technology otherwise you cant compete at all. I agree with CW that if Vas would only have taken from Fruit then this would have been unfair acting but in his case he took also from Crafty and perhaps even others, so that his wrong is slowly changing into research, what he was trained for during his studies and also his first jobs. All what I understood is that Vas found s sophisticated test method that brought him faster insight into what could be useful and what not. As Ed said, these 300 to 400 Elo point improvements in a single year (over the level of the program that he had allegedly ripped) are speaking of his mastership and this was the trick of his future success.

I saw Bob argue that also others could do that which is true, but not at the time then so that we can seriously call Vas the champion of the second part of the first decade of the new century. Success and genius is alway depending on time and technical progress. Vas was so clever to grasp the new possibilities to improve existing code. Without this the Nazis would have won but with the new insight the Brits stole (extracted the secrets of) the code of the Nazis and prevented them to win. Sports and especially in chess is like war. We shouldnt begin to talk like sissies. We still are uninformed what Shredder is doing in his secrets. We dont know what Junior is reaching for, but we know that Vas with versions 3 and 4 of his Rybka is number one without any copies of code from alien sources.

after CW has been forbidden to enter the panel and after Ed left for good out of protest, who then spoke for the defense of Vas? But everybody thinks that this was a valid process by decent people? I doubt that.

Why is The Hague an illegal court? Answer: because the Americans are totally excluded and cant be held responsible for their crimes of war. In parts we have the same here with the chess programmers.

I want to add a little satire. I wouldnt be surprised if Vas created Strelka and also the other clones after he saw all the unethical attitudes among his peers. In short for me Vas is the most clever guy in the actual scene of computerchess and no lame senior club of older men around Levy and the other Dutch professor could tame his fire.

It's breathtaking how silent Vas remained during all these years of terror and witchhunting. He's not only the best chess programmer but also a role model for all of us, if we are planning to write premature articles in internet fora.

Ed worked on Rebel.  Ed signed the original protest letter to the ICGA along with (I believe) 11 other program authors.  So he thought the investigation was needed.   I only hope that he looked at the previous discussions on fruit / rybka 1.0 beta I and others had participated in, and actually _read_ the analysis.  Which would certainly be different than what he did when claiming that crafty's skill gains are because of ideas taken from Rybka.  He obviously did not look at Crafty's source.  The particular issue he raised, effective branching factor, was about 10 lines of search code that was modified +very+ slightly, and nothing similar is done in ip*/robo* and friends.  The particular Elo gain he quoted (300-400 elo) was actually 40-50 and I provided the data.  Others had already provided CCRL data to show something similar to my cluster testing Elo data.

What led to this is unknown.

All that unfortunately alers nothing to the fact that it is beyond moronic to claim someone used Ippo ideas, just because he improved the branching factor of his engine... Especially when the the code is pubic.