Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 11:50:13 02/17/99
Go up one level in this thread
On February 16, 1999 at 19:36:13, Fernando Villegas wrote: >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. One of the arguments being used in support of these clones is that they don't play like the original. It's easy to make a program not play like the original. You simply tweak the piece-square tables, mess with the king-safety, mess with the pawn structure eval, and make a few other changes as appropriate. You could do this in a few hours. This does not make a new program. This effort does not make the tweaker a coequal partner in the development process. I find it abhorent that some people don't have a problem with these people being considered as somehow superior to Bob because whoever contends that the tweaked thing can beat the untweaked version. >Besides, Is not the way science and technology grows? First trains wagons seemed >conventional horses pulled wagons. Same shape, etc. Relativity cannot be >understood without Nweton phisics, Einstein made his job on the ground of >previous jobs. I don not imagine Nweton saying "Hey, you have stolen 98% of my >ideas, you thief...!" Or just 23% if you want. In other words, this is a >collective endeavour even if individual wheels into it feel it is not so and try >to get all the credit or using general knowledege just for themselves without >interest in share his own ideas, but then even so they will be used by someone >else. Nobody can hide nothing for ever and be taken away the general trend of >huma thinking and movement. Julio Verne kind of scientific monsters are not >posible. You can delay, nothing else. Bob chose the contrary, to push, and that >is his great achievement. Crafty is not an idea, Crafty is something tangible, it is a product of engineering as well as research, it is covered by a license, which is backed up by law, and hopefully by public opinion. Bob has the right to put whatever restrictions he wants on the resale or redistribution of Crafty. If he wants to tell people they can call it "Drafty" and resell it, that is his right. If he wants to tell people they can modify it and redistribute the binary while keeping the source secret from everyone including Bob, that's his right. This is all purely up to Bob, and everyone else has to respect this because in theory we live in a civilized world where you can't just club someone and take what you want from them regardless of their wishes. It does not seem that Bob has allowed people to do either of these things, and his legal rights should be respected by everyone. Assuming that people conform to the license that Bob has associated with Crafty, there are other problems. If someone gets Crafty, modifies it so that it is "better", and makes the source available, as required by the Crafty license, in such a way that satisfies Bob, I don't think that they have the *right* to enter a sanctioned tournament as sole author of the new creation. I think that Bob will always be a co-author, and he should have authority to say that yes, he'd like a specific entry to compete in a specific tournament, or no, he wouldn't. And since these tournaments have rules about individual authors entering more than once, he shouldn't be able to give approval to more than one of these Crafty-derived entries, including his own. bruce
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