Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Why ban List now?

Author: Terry McCracken

Date: 20:28:05 11/27/03

Go up one level in this thread


On November 27, 2003 at 23:01:01, Roger D Davis wrote:

>On November 27, 2003 at 22:44:07, Terry McCracken wrote:
>
>>On November 27, 2003 at 22:29:24, Roger D Davis wrote:
>>
>>>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
>>
>>You're cutting and pasting your arguments now....I think you are creating
>>something out of nothing, I think you don't know what you're talking about but
>>would like to impress us...well I'm not impressed!
>>
>>You're attacking the ICGA with little information, and asserting that what they
>>have done is nothing short of criminal!
>>
>>Sir, that's your opinion and it teeters on libel.
>
>I'm cutting and pasting because my opinion hasn't changed, even those the
>posters have. I'm not attacking the ICGA, only the decision making process that
>was followed. And it may turn out that the author should have been banned. But
>that doesn't mean that the decision-making process didn't fail, and that the
>rules won't need clarification next time around.
>
>Roger

You're attacking a process you know little about, and you can't state factually
the decision process failed! You _think_ it failed or may have failed. This is
opinion, not fact.

Nuff Said...



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.