Author: Djordje Vidanovic
Date: 19:05:37 02/16/99
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On February 16, 1999 at 20:54:20, Jeremiah Penery wrote: >On February 16, 1999 at 19:36:13, Fernando Villegas wrote: > ><snip> > >>Maybe Bionic or Voyager have 99% of components from Crafty, but if the behaviour >>is not like Crafty, then is not Crafty. A chess program is for playing chess and >>so matters of style and strenght are the important ones, no how was done, how >>many new or olds pieces has, etc. > ><snip> > >This seems very wrong. For example, I can take Crafty source and add *ONLY TWO >LINES* and make it play completely differently, yet still very strongly. But, I >CAN NOT claim the program to be my own. Even though you wouldn't be able to >tell it was Crafty by looking at the games it played, it still would be Crafty. > >As Dann said, if I take one of your articles and change a few words, it is still >YOUR article, even if nobody would be able to tell you wrote it. > >Jeremiah At first glance what you just said does seem to be true, and it really is true, but only applied to _static_ entities, such as articles, statues, hanging gardens, stuffed birds, etc. However, when you deal with _dynamic_ entities, where one little thing can change the behaviour of the _whole system_ (one thing leading to another) then your line of reasoning is not correct. Thus, you may have an engineer researching a prototype for 50 yrs and not finding the right solution whereupon someone else comes along and by working on it for a couple of years finds the little something that was missing, implements this little something (watch out, all the works are there, the internal structure was already present) and the prototype machine is working as it should have been in the first place. (Now, all this is very much a "Gedanken" experiment so beware.) Who do we credit with the prototype, the guy who set up the rig that was not working, or not working the way it should have, or the new guy? What I've just said is terrible, I know, but then all analogies limp, don't they, they are all wobbly -- just as your analogy with that hypothetical article of Fernando's is... There is an old maxim -- Ex nihilo nihil fit. "There is nothing new under the sun" -- Bob Hyatt is only a link in a very long chain of general human thought, and he came up with something new with reference to something else that he had built on. The authors of Bionic did the same, and they acknowledged their intellectual debt as is proper. But, bear in mind that they ***competed*** in an official tourney -- the Dutch Open. Voyager, about which there has been so talk, never took part in an official tourney, it was in the works, so to speak. And then someone (there is only a limited number of people who could have done that!) mustered up his morals and courage to give a copy of a completely unfinished product, a program in the making, caught in the midst of tuning and testing and trying out, with the bare essentials of the code implemented, a program that would never have been used publicly as it was. That particular copy had never taken part in an official tourney, nor did the author plan to do so. What's the fuss then? The author is, according to my knowledge, still working on Voyager. It is not the old, uneven and Crafty-resembling version anymore. I could not reproduce more than 20 or so percent of PVs corresponding to Crafty with Voyager 3.08a specially designed for the Fritz 5.32 interface... Voyager is turning into a very interesting program, surely using some borrowed ideas, but Bob did the same thing building up on the ideas he may have got while perusing the source code of Chess 4.x or Coco, or whatever. I know of at least two programs that have stemmed from the Gnuchess source which are rightly considered as full-fledged original programs now since they really bear no resemblence to Gnu *anymore*. But they did at first... And so the world goes on, and layers of tradition settle one upon another, but one does not, and, indeed, should not always start anew! That is called, in its widest sense, civilisation. Regards, Djordje
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