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Subject: Re: Some comments to various replies

Author: martin fierz

Date: 08:33:09 12/01/03

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On December 01, 2003 at 10:13:28, Steven Edwards wrote:

>On December 01, 2003 at 09:52:01, martin fierz wrote:
>>On December 01, 2003 at 09:35:37, Steven Edwards wrote:
>
>>>1. The proposed fingerprinting scheme is not intended to detect cloning of code
>>>that is not immediately related to move selection (why bother?), so criticisms
>>>on that basis are irrelevent.
>>
>>if i throw out crafty's evaluation and stick in my own evaluation, i will pass
>>your test. do you really think that such an engine should be allowed to play in
>>a computer tournament?
>
>Well, Crafty's Search() and Eval() may be more closely interconnected than what
>might be first apparent.
>
>If your own evaluation is significantly different than Crafty's and gives
>different results, then one of two cases will occur:
>
>1. The program plays the same or worse than Crafty, so why bother entering?

lots of people enter CC tournaments with engines that have no chance against
crafty. why not? if you wrote a program, you want to see it play.
i cannot understand the motivation of a cloner in the first place - why bother
cloning? so your argument about "why bother" doesn't apply to such people :-)

>2. The program plays better than Crafty, so it is sufficiently different because
>of skillful modifications, and one would assume that the skill could also be
>applied to other parts of the program to make it different in other aspects.  So
>I'd say that it was a different program.

different yes, but still not an original program. i don't know the exact
numbers, but i guess crafty's evaluation is something like 10-30% of the code.
leaving a huge part of crafty in that program, with all the tricks that i will
probably never find out as amateur programmer.

>It's a question of motivation.  If a cloner would make the large amount of
>effort to successfully avoid fingerprint detection, why wouldn't he instead
>spend that effort on doing original work?

i'd bet i could modify crafty in a couple of hours and pass your test. i've
worked MUCH more than that on my own program, and crafty annihilates it. forget
all logical/rational arguments like "why wouldn't he..." - they don't apply to
cloners.

some people do very irrational stuff. a few of these clone chess programs, at
least that's harmless...

cheers
  martin



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