Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: How much blatant copying of code is acceptable/unacceptable

Author: Daniel Clausen

Date: 23:52:35 08/22/04

Go up one level in this thread


On August 23, 2004 at 01:20:25, Lance Perkins wrote:

>1. If someone has a novel with 100 chapters but 1 chapter is a copy
>from another novel, is that OK? Anyway it is only 1 percent of
>the entire book.

We don't have a clear definition of what a clone is which everyone accepts and
which would cover all cases. And chances are good that we'll never come up with
one.

If a definition is vague, it probably covers the extreme sides ("not a clone at
all - everything is original (maybe even ideas)" and "a clone - everything is
copied except "Hello from Crafty!" converted to "Hello from MyEngine!") That
won't help at all in all the cases that are on the border though. And these are
the interesting cases.

If a definition tries to be specific, it's usually easy to bring a
counterexample.

Concerning your example: Copying a whole chapter from another novel (let's say
it's more than 2 lines...) is not acceptable at all. (except for when it's used
as a stylistic device) When it comes to chess though, it's not that obvious
anymore. In my engine I have one function (well, it's a static method, but that
doesnt' change things) identical to Crafty - the function that produces 64bit
random numbers. In my sources, I've included both Bobs original reference to
Knuths implementation and Bobs implementation in the Crafty sources.

Is my engine a Crafty-clone? I don't think so. *looks a lil bit worried around*
;)

[snip]

Sargon



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.