Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 22:03:10 11/30/03
The recent fiasco regarding a suspected clone has shown that the process used, an anonymous accusation followed by a coercive source demand, is an unacceptably poor method for handling potential source plagiarism. The clear need here is for a method that does not depend on subjective human evaluation of similarity of play or upon the random accusation of a non-biased party. My proposal is instead to use a test suite to provide a performance fingerprint of all the entrants in a competition. This fingerprint is constucted by running the same EPD test suite for each program immediately prior to the start of an event and then automatically checking the resulting EPD output files with some predetermined similarity metric. The same suite can be fed to non-competing programs if necessary. The similarity test would look at both the PV and the evaluation scores of each record generated and this should be enough for clone detection. The test suite has to be the same for each program, but it does not have to be the same suite for each event; neither does it have to be disclosed beforehand. It would be best to automatically generate the suite by taking a hundred or so high level decisive game scores and selecting a near terminal position from each one. The selected position would be for the winning side a few moves prior to the end of the game. Advantages: 1. Does not depend on random accusations. 2. Source code is kept private. 3. Equal application for all entrants. 4. No subjectivity, except for deciding the cutoff point for too much similarity. 5. Mostly automated process. 6. Done prior to the event, so no surprises during the event. 7. Should discourage cloners from entering an undisclosed clone in the first place. Disadvantages: 1. Requires an hour or so of computing for each program per event. 2. Someone has to write the similarity metric generator.
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