Author: Odd Gunnar Malin
Date: 05:07:11 01/17/02
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On January 17, 2002 at 06:14:08, Sune Fischer wrote: >On January 17, 2002 at 06:06:51, Daniel Clausen wrote: > >>Hi >> >>On January 17, 2002 at 05:55:49, Sune Fischer wrote: >> >>[a lot snipped] >> >>>And just what is a clone, perhaps there should be a definition of that. >>>When is code-reuse just saving time by not reinventing the deep plate, and when >>>is it *cloning*? >>>Am I cloning if I use Crafty's movegenerator and search extensions? >> >>While it's probably not that easy to come up with a useful definition of >>cloning, which the majority accepts, your example sounds rather clear to me. >> >>-if you copy code from someone (like the whole move generator) it's cloning >>(you'd also have to copy Bob's board representation etc etc etc) >>-if you have a look at Bob's code to see how he handles ep generation or what >>kind of search extensions he uses, it's not cloning (afterall that's one reason >>why Bob's Crafty is freely available with source, and I'm sure it was helpful to >>_many_ chessprogrammers already, me included) >> >>I agree that there can be cases where it's hard to decide, but very often people >>use these few hard cases to say that the general case is hard to decide. I think >>that 99% of the cases are trivial to decide. (ie in most cases a 'strings >>engine_name' is more than enough) >> >>Sargon > >Yes, but for a newcommer you can save a lot of time if you take Gerbil, TSCP or >Gnuchess or whatever and start from there, you now have all the basic stuff >running and just saved a month or two in development time. >The program could quickly develop into something unique, but exactly at which >point does it cease to be clone? ;) > If you start from another code, or copy parts from it you must at least get their permision to do so if you planed to let it be available for the public. There is no need for a copywrite message or any other claim in the code for a published code to be regarded as 'intellectual achievement' in most if not all western country. From this to actuall be using your program in a contest with other's that have invented the wheel again it is in my view very impolite. I see that there could be a problem when there is published small code fragment instead of pseudo code to explain some ideas. Take for instance the tree line code in Heinz's book which explain how to proceed in KBNk endings. Hard to implement this without using the exact lines so i had to use a piece-sqaure table to drive the king to the corner. The published source should be taken as sample code to be looked at if you miss the point when you try to learn something about a topic, a suplement to the book, and not used when you do the programming job. Odd Gunnar
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