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Subject: Re: A thank you to all computer chess programmers

Author: Ian Osgood

Date: 10:19:04 03/20/00

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On March 19, 2000 at 10:21:34, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>
>All good points...  but you overlook one important aspect of 'cheating'.  I
>was personally involved in handling a dispute at an ACM event _many_ years ago,
>where someone copied a commercial program, used a debugger to change most of
>the strings inside it, and then tried to pass it off as their own program for
>a microcomputer championship.  IE it is probably impossible to prevent cheating,
>and rumors of cheating.
>

This has more recently occurred in the computer Go arena.  Within the last two
years, there was a successful Korean program called Silver Igo entered in the
world competitions.  It played very similarly to a previous champion named
Goemate (previously called Handtalk).  The author made a binary comparison and
found significant plagarism which he documented convincingly.  As a result, the
major computer Go events now have anti-plagarism rules.

>
>But no doubt there _are_ exceptions.  We will continue to see Voyagers,
>Le Petites, and others...

Apparently so.  Note that Handtalk was written in *assembly*.  He couldn't have
distributed source easily even if he wanted to, so that is not necessarily a
deterent.

Ian



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