WHAT are you talking about?

I was in a poetic mood.

> I am sure Bob is not too offended, in fact he'll be ok with anything except "more to come".

There isn't more to come, after Mark's poor performance of yesterday I am done with the issue.

I haven't called anyone a "monkey"...

Robbolito is hundreds of points stronger than Now, so you would do much better starting with 98% robbo and 2% Now! :-)

No, Vas, that's way too specific!

Please Jury, not this again.

Vas

Jury, 

Three questions off topic:

1. Is the new Strelka 5.1 a clone of Houdini 1.5a?
2. Which are the biggest changes in Strelka 5.1?
3. How much time you taked to decompile it?

Gaмßito.

New record ?

Very good idea. In fact Vas told me he'd only come here for a few days - which are over now. I think he won't be back before Rybka 5 beta testing starts.

We do not see any "procedural flaws".  We chose the best people we could find to investigate this.  The data was presented as clearly and concisely as possible.  It was even presented by three different documents.  Zach's report, Mark's report, and the ICGA technical summary.

The ICGA is a private organization.  If you want to hire outside investigators to go back over what we found, I'd be happy to point you to some, or to put you in touch with a couple of well-known compiler guys that could point you to the right people to do a make-over of the semantic analysis we did.  You will have to pay them, of course.  And that was our conundrum, how to get the best people with no budget to do so.  Programmers already pay to join the ICGA.  The ICGA uses that to pay for the quarterly journal it produces.  There is no giant pool of money to hire independent contractors.  And there is no need.  We have had MANY investigations in the past.  Several programs have been banned, or booted, depending on when they were caught.  The ICGA is free to investigate these complaints however it wants.  I don't see how it could have been done in any other way.  There are not many computer chess people on the planet, particularly those intimately familiar with compiler optimization, x86 assembly language, semantic analysis, and with significant experience in working on chess programs so that the various bits and pieces of an engine make sense and are understood. 

I STILL find it ludicrous to consider Ken Thompson as (a) incompetent;  He developed Unix for heaven's sake.  And the various versions of the belle chess program / machine.  Not to mention C and other things.  (b) biased.  Based on what?  He hasn't competed since the 80's.  (c) a rubber-stamper.  I've known Ken since the 70's, and he is ANYTHING BUT a sign and forget type.  There were plenty of others.  When this investigation started about 5 years ago, I was ALSO quite skeptical of the claims.  I started looking.  And the more I looked, the less I liked what I saw.  A few months of examination and I was pretty well convinced, and the more time passed, the MORE convinced I became.  Nothing exculpatory was found.  Nada.  But the evidence showing copying continued to grow.  And grow.  And finally a large group of programmers filed a formal protest with the ICGA early in 2011 and the formal process started.

So calling the process "flawed" is just a deflection of attention, and is actually grossly inaccurate.  Calling the panel "biased" suggests that 30+ people were ALL biased and had some mystery axe to grind vis a vis Rybka.  Saying the ICGA was "non-transparent" is simply an unfounded statement.  We actively discussed the evidence, even before the ICGA was formally involved.  The report and all evidence developed has been made public.  Part of the discussions were kept private, at the request of those taking part, just like jury deliberations are not made public, only their final verdict.  So how could things be more transparent?  And on the other side, talking about being "opaque" how do you characterize Vas' refusal to even discuss this with the ICGA, even after the report was finished where could write any sort of rebuttal he wanted, without having to interact directly with the panel he if so chose.  I am aware of no "secrets or hidden information" of any kind.  I do not believe that most on the panel would allow that to transpire, in fact.  So I have no idea what you are talking about there.  The ICGA rules have been discussed over a period of 40 years.  Nothing secret about them.  Nothing ambiguous about them.  They are just as general as the general thread of the US constitution, and have been interpreted consistently for years as other programs were investigated and proven guilty as well.  Most here simply are completely unfamiliar with the ICGA, its purpose, the purpose of the rules, or even the concept of "original program" as it applies to the ICGA in general, and tournament rule 2 specifically.  And so we see all the speculation about what the ICGA should be doing, what the rule should allow, what the investigative process should and should not do, all in what would properly be termed an intellectual vacuum regarding computer chess.  SR's report harped on one thing, over and over.  Rule 2.  One does not get to violate a rule just because one disagrees with it.  Every OTHER competitor has been aware of rule 2.  They are aware of what happens to those that violate the rule and get caught.  They are aware of the reasons the rule is used.  So it is pretty funny to see someone like SR, who has never written a chess program (nor any other kind of program I suspect based on the misstatements he has made) tell us what kind of rule we should be using, and why OUR interpretation of basic concepts like ideas vs actual source code are both wrong (in one breath) and then outdated (in his next rail against it).  WE, the competitors, made the rules to make the tournament into what we wanted it to be.  A non-chess-programmer telling us what our rules should be is quite similar to a home framing sub-contractor telling a neurosurgeon which points he should cauterize first, where the incision should be made, etc.  He has no clue.  Neither do the non-competitors regarding rule 2.

If the programmers did not like rule 2, they would either change it or not participate in events that use it.  To date, neither has happened.  The rules have been amended from time to time.  But nothing in the present case warrants this, other than we will likely try to make it easier on future panels by having some sort of source code repository for competing versions, so that the reverse-engineering approach does not need to be used.