Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 01:19:50 02/18/99
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On February 17, 1999 at 15:20:37, Fernando Villegas wrote: >Of course by definition, but this only changes the place of the problem. Instead >of wondering what a program should be to be considered a program by itself, now >the question would be what a guy should be to be considered an author. If Bionic >is different -yhe old discussion- his fathers are "authors". If not, the are >not. So we arrive at the same point. So we need even more rules whcih will carry >new boundaries to be defined at nauseaum. Perhaps some kind of torumament for >second generation authors should be invented :-) I think there are some bad traps here. We have the following things that can be done to a freeware program: A1) Minor evaluation changes. A2) Major evaluation and extension changes (plays very different). A3) Gut the entire thing and leave nothing but the UI, essentially. We have a few things that secondary authors can do: B1) Sell it. B2) Enter it in an ICCA tournament without original author's permission. B3) Claim sole authorship. There has been some contention about whether the Bionic or Voyager guys did A1 or A2. I don't think it matters much. In either case, B1, B2, and B3 are all out of the question, in my opinion. If someone does A1, the original author is still the person most responsible for the program, and deserves sole authorship, and the secondary author deserves a minor credit if that. If they do A2, there is the potential for some major effort to have been done, and even legitimate research and no need at all for recriminations. The secondary author assumes the status of co-author. But in my opinion options B2 and B3 are still out of the question. There is a lot more to a program than eval and search extensions. There is a lot of infrastructure, *especially* in Crafty, devoted to moving pieces around the board, hash table stuff, parallel search, and setting up data structures that can be use to efficiently generate evaluation terms. And not only that, there is the opening book compiler, and the two forms of learning that Bob uses. Note that I am not necessarily ruling out A3 as a fine thing to do while still doing some of the B's, but you'd have to wonder what is left over in the program at that point, and I'd be very concerned that some of the strength-producing elements of Crafty might be left over. You may as well just write your own thing from scratch and hook it up to Winboard. bruce
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