Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 20:49:39 04/30/02
Go up one level in this thread
On April 30, 2002 at 16:01:33, Slater Wold wrote: >On April 30, 2002 at 14:42:50, Jeroen Noomen wrote: > >>During the last 6 - 12 months I have noticed a trend that there are very clear >>indications that non-commercial programmers of chess programs make use of (parts >>of) commercially available books. As I was in Maastricht during the WMCCC in >>2001, lots of speculations and complaints were heard about this topic. From >>several sources I know that also the Rebel books have been ‘hacked’ by people (I >>will not mention their names, I am sure they know themselves whom I am talking >>about). As the Rebel books are my lifework I want to put a very clear statement >>in this forum. >> >>The Rebel books have been developped by me during a period of almost 14 years. >>Not only is it handmade, it also contains lots of stuff you will not find in >>other books. In the past it has happenend a few times that chess programs were >>caught as not being made by the programmer himself. Examples are Quick Step back >>in 1989, Greif, the several Crafty clones. As we can see from todays rules by >>the ICCA, such programs are not tolerated anymore. And in my view this is fully >>correct. >> >>Jeroen Noomen >>Bookauthor for Rebel and Chess Tiger > >I can understand your frustration. You've worked just as hard as Ed or >Christophe on Rebel/Tiger. No doubt your books add a considerable amount of Elo >to these programs, and I am sure Ed and Christophe are very appreciative of >that. > >However, I must warn you that laying claim to a series of chess opening moves is >not going to be easy to defend. You cannot copyright moves in chess, as you >cannot copyright dance moves. While you can copyright a mvs book, you are >actually only copyrighting the format. Again, you cannot copyright chess moves. > >I think anyone found 'hacking' a chess program, or its book, should face a >severe punishment. Anyone claiming something is their, when in fact it is not, >should be punished. If someone has the skill to disassemble a binary executable and figure out how something with the complexity of a chess program works from the ASM level, then good for them. They earned the right to use what they learned. Note that I said "to use what they learned", not "they earned the right to copy and paste". For example, let's pretend that the alpha-beta algorithm wasn't widely known and only a few programs used it. If someone begins analyzing the chess engine's code and after a long hard time of trying to break the program down and figure it out, someone finally figures out how the alpha-beta algorithm works, I think they should be able to use that. Binary distribution does not translate to "you can't look at this and learn from it." I don't think people should go around just taking huge chunks of code out of other people's binary distributions or source code distributions, but you can learn a lot from them and if you take the time to do so, I see nothing wrong with using what you've learned. So when you say, "anyone found hacking a chess engine", I think you are mistakenly throwing people into a category that they do not belong. Hacking a file to derive a general method isn't so bad. Hacking a file to derive some set data, such as an opening book, is more questionable, but not entirely 100% worthy of "severe punishment". Geez, it's a game people. Have some fun and lighten up. >I am not defending these people, I am simply stating the fact that it would be >easier to encrypt the books, than to go after those stealing it. If you encrypt the book, that does absolutely nothing to protect the data. The reason is that if someone is skilled enough to hack binary executables, then they will be talented enough to hack the binary executable and reverse engineer the decrtyption algorithm. If it's in the binary, it's not secure. So basically if the program is going to be able to decrypt the file, so is anyone else who wants to bad enough. Granted it's something probably 99.999999% of the world wouldn't be able to do, but there's always someone who can get that kind of job done. Russell
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