Author: Roger D Davis
Date: 19:29:24 11/27/03
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On November 27, 2003 at 21:59:05, margolies,marc wrote: >evidence does not 'authorize the committee.' >The authority of that kind of Committee rests in the Players agreements to be >bound to the rules of the tournament and membership in this organization(ICGA) >which seeks to protect its prestige. >This is not a criminal action. The committee is not some kind of grand jury >assembled for the purpose of hanging programmers. Whatever evidence exists, >someone with the authority to act felt it was just to ask these questions now. >If someone enters a world championship in absentia, and does not respond to >tournament directors queries, apparently he can be banned in absentia. This >appears just to me. The alternative I envisage would be to require the presence >of all Programmers at the event so this will not happen again. Do you advocate >that or would you rather the commitee had this power? > Of course it's a criminal action...the guy has been sentenced to no further participation until 2006. My guess is that the programmer didn't respond because he felt that it was rediculous that his source code be requested on the basis of circumstantial evidence alone. If you believe circumstantial evidence is sufficient to force an author to produce his source, then you will disagree with me. However, the author had already denied there was any connection between List and Crafty. At that point it was his word against the word of the accuser. Recognizing that the rules don't say whether circumstantial evidence alone is sufficient to ask a programmer to produce his source, don't say when experts should be consulted, and don't state any similarity metric which determines originality, the committee chose an authoritarian frame of reference, asserting its authority to ask for the source. The committee had a variety of options and courses of action. In contrast, once the committee chose an authoritarian route, the author could choose only to conform, or not. The problem with an authoritarian frame of reference is that it fails to respect the rights of all the parties involved. Hence the need for due process. In my judgment, that process would have involved asking the accuser for stronger evidence, then asking experts outside the committee whether this evidence rose to a level necessary to justify asking for the source code. And if these experts agreed, and if the source was requested and denied, then the author could have and SHOULD HAVE been banned. One of those experts could have been Bob Hyatt. My position is that this course of action is not only consistent with the charter, but also that it embodies the spirit of the charter by expressing the principle of Good Faith, the foundation of all rewarding human relations. It might have allowed the author to finish the tournament, it would have made the committee look exceedingly careful and judicious in dealing with the whole affair, it would have produced a verdict about List that was closer to the truth, and it would have respected everyone on all sides. Instead, we have this controversy, to which there is no easy resolution. And we may never know the truth about List. Roger
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