Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 10:35:25 02/18/99
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On February 18, 1999 at 11:52:12, KarinsDad wrote: >On February 18, 1999 at 04:19:50, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >[snip] >> >>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. > >There is another possibility which some people may feel is a gray area. > >A4) Use it as a development test suite. In other words, develop your own >components to replace Crafty components, but speed up your development (in some >areas, slow it down in others due to the massive interrelationships between >Crafty components) by having a set of code which will temporarily do all of >those things that you need in a chess program that you haven't yet coded. When >you are finished, there isn't a byte left of Crafty source, but you used it to >create your own. > >I personally think that even though you keep this on a standalone machine in >your basement and you replace every line of code (and the project structure, >etc.), that you have modified Crafty. You have just done it many times and >didn't let anyone know you were doing it. However, I can see where others would >disagree that this is a totally new program (it is) and therefore, it isn't >Crafty. My problem with it is that the copyright is clear on changes and does >not care about the whys or wherefores (i.e. the intent of the person modifying >the code is irrelevant to making those changes public). This is a harder area to >make a judgment on. I think that this is a lot more hypothetical than the other cases. People aren't going to replace all of the components unit by unit, since the components interact with each other significantly. What is going to happen is that people are going to replace the parts they have big ideas about, and leave the parts in that don't achieve a high enough (interesting + fun) / (difficult + futile) ratio. The search extensions are interesting and fun, and not difficult at all to mess with, and there is the chance that the program might get tactically better, so people will mess with this. The eval function is more difficult but also more interesting. On the other side, the way Crafty interacts with its hash table isn't very interesting to a secondary author, wouldn't be at all fun to change, would be hard to change significantly, and probably wouldn't make the program any better, so this won't get changed either. The same is true of the move generation stuff, which would be massively difficult to change, and would also probably be futile. These guys are going to go for the areas that are fun, fairly easy, and have a lot of perceived effect. Nobody will ever replace every component, there would be no reason to do it. When you start it would be fun to change, but there would be a point where the fun would go out of it and people will stop, and huge parts of Crafty would be untouched, and we'll have "beginner" programs that are SMP capable and make sound positional sacrifices. bruce
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