Author: Mridul Muralidharan
Date: 05:25:02 05/29/05
Go up one level in this thread
On May 28, 2005 at 12:29:33, Günther Simon wrote: >On May 28, 2005 at 12:20:00, Vladimir Elin wrote: > >>Hi Alex, >>I think that reason for you to use only engines with open sources and delete >>all engines were you can see words : alpha, beta, prunning and many many etc. > >Vladimir that is really a dumb post after all... > >Guenther > >>You idea that Patriot 2.0 is clone - full absurd. >>Best. >>Vladimir. Is it really such a dumb post ? I am not sure - whenever someone mentions "clone" , I am skeptical - inspite of the number of clones that are discovered. I prefer to give the author the benifit of doubt - a genourously large benifit at that. Nothing is opensource programs is a "secret" , I mean - even if they were not opensource , the amateur (and definitely professional) authors will have arrived (or already have) at them independently : by expiriments or through available docs. I dont really see any ground breaking code or idea in any of the opensource engines today - all are straight forward implementations of the standard theory. Most , if not all , clone accusations show as "proof" something really dumb - like string search , result in a single position , behaviour of a parser (which is _not_ part of the engine as such people !) , etc - maybe these are the only possible ways to identify clones (I am not sure - and as I have posted before , I dont really care much) , but based on such flimsy grounds people should not accuse others. When you accuse a program as a clone - you are also maligning the reputation of the author : which is the more serious thing IMHO. What Vladimir Elin is hinting at is that (I think) , people (usually non-chess engine programmers who know quiet little about the programming aspects) see something/anything strange (in their eyes) and cry wolf. Like a string search which returns strings - which might be what is defined in the pgn spec , or a binary search which returns data match (whcih might be de to a generated parser for pgn handling for book) , etc ! Ofcourse wachful people are always needs to see the hints which will lead to the identification of many clones , but IMO we need a better way to decide how to identify clones. The current process seems to be : 1) Accuse 2) Flame 3) Author defends 4) mudslinging 5) Nasty posts - brining the author's whole family history to the ground 6) Challenge (to show source) 7) If 6 accepted , cleared , else branded as clone. I dont know about others, but no I am never going to send my source code to someone I dont personally trust - even if the rest of the computer chess community might seem to. Not everyone knows what the non-opensource guys are doing in their code : and personally I do many a stupid things , but I might have something interesting too :) So why have opensource engines ? - different question anyway , we wont discuss that since it is largely an authors decision. We should try to promote the number of amateur engines so that as many people as possible should enter this field - not discourage people. (both within reasonable limits ofcourse) Mridul
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