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Subject: Re: A fix for the clone detection problem

Author: Roberto Nerici

Date: 00:42:28 12/01/03

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On December 01, 2003 at 03:25:47, Russell Reagan wrote:

>On December 01, 2003 at 02:46:49, Hristo wrote:
>
>>What is the question:
>>Is this program an original work?
>
>In my opinion, that should not be the question. I think the goal is to prevent
>someone from stealing someone else's expression of their ideas and claiming them
>as their own, not to make absolutely sure that not a single line of code was
>borrowed from another program.

[snip]

>So basically I think what is important is that someone doesn't just take Crafty
>and make a few changes (like changing the name) and then calling it their own
>program and enter tournaments. The idea of using test positions and comparing
>the results should be good enough to detect those weak attempts at cheating. If
>someone modifies it enough so that it plays different moves most of the time (as
>often as any other program), then they have probably done some significant work,
>and we can give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that isn't the best
>theoretical solution, but in reality it is probably a very good solution since
>it doesn't border on paranoia and is not invasive to the programmers.

It is a difficult area and I don't think there is going to be a really good
solution. I agree that Steven's suggestion could detect the case where someone
takes Crafty and changes just the name, but I disagree that that is useful.
Although I think the test position system wouldn't be a great deal of work, IMHO
even that amount of effort wouldn't be justified by only catching the most
blatent cheats.

What I find confusing is that Steven says that he is making this proposal in
response to the Crafty/List type issue, yet I can't see how it addresses it.

Roberto/.



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