Author: Don Dailey
Date: 18:28:49 01/25/99
Go up one level in this thread
On January 25, 1999 at 08:24:14, Fernando Villegas wrote: >Hi: >I have been amazed a little bit by the fact that in the long thread about bionic >as a clone or not nobody seems to have given data about how much Bionic is >really something new or not, to begin with. The only thing that has been said >about his presumed novelty is Dgeordge Vidanovic's statement that it is new; >only thing that has been said about his presumed clone quality is the afirmation >by Bob that a program that has changed only 1% of the code cannot be considered >something new. Well, which are the data to support one or the other statement? >Maybe also some elaboration would be needed. By example, how much percentage of >code change it is neccesary to talk of a change? It is enough a different >behaviour of the engine? >By the way, this last point could be deceiving. I can change dramatically the >behaviour of CM6000 just altering strongly one of the paremeters of the code, >say, putting the queen value at only 0.5 pawns. I bet that that would be enough >to get an extremely different PV from the engine. >Fernando I was in Leiden and Hans told me how much code was changed. Basically, the evaluation was completely re-worked. He said that all the weights had been changed in the existing terms and that a pre-processor was designed and that this is where significant knowledge was actually added. What this means is that the huge amounts of code remained completely unchanged. Also, it means that even the evaluation was not re-done, only added to. The only issue to me right now is whether they misrepresented the program. I believe they did these things Hans said they did but did they use this version on the first week or an unmodified Crafty? That is what I want to know, because this would represent a gross misrepresentation. There are a lot of important and interesting issues that flow from this, but IF they did just what they said they did, I have no problem with this, they were up front and honest about it and we can later decide about the fairness of this. There of course is the issue of not consulting Bob and they also seemed to imply to me that they had Bob's blessing. But this is somewhat subject to misinterpretation. In my opinion we are being way too hard on them for actually modifying Crafty, taking it to a tournament and laying out in advance exactly what they did. Only if it turns out that they lied about this and actually used an unmodified version of Crafty will I have lost respect. I think we should be really careful and open minded until we figure this out. But I do want to know and am running some tests on Cilkchess to seek some experimental evidence either way and so are others of us I hope. I think a big mistake we are making is that we don't seem to value anything that is "free" or easily copied. You have no idea how much work goes into a quality chess program. It is enormous, as any good chess program author will tell you. Essentially, most of us are friendly and generous about sharing our ideas. But you have no right to expect us to be generous about giving away our names. If I found a way to take your journalistic work and attach my own name to it, I would have taken something from you that is a lot more valuable than a collection of ideas. - Don
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.