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Subject: Re: Bionic vs Crafty, once again

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 22:02:08 01/23/99

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On January 23, 1999 at 11:52:41, Frank Quisinsky wrote:

>Hello,
>
>sorry for my bad english.
>
>I don't understand the excitement.
>
>I have played over 400 games with Crafty. A very beautiful program. Compliment
>Mister Hyatt, also for your informative contributions in the Newsgroups.
>
>The Source code of Crafty is free.
>
>Other programmers use this code and that, OK is. Or why the code is free!
>

the code is 'free' so that the things done in crafty can be seen and used as
examples of things to try, things not to try, etc.  But that is a _far_ cry from
taking a program that is pretty mature, and entering a slightly modified version
of it in a tournament where the other participants spent their many man-hours of
work to write their own code,  And then they run into a program that is 2x
faster than theirs because that program uses a parallel search developed by
someone else.

That was my major problem with the Dutch championship.  To take crafty as a
starting point to modify is fine.  But that was _not_ done.  Just compare the
SMP version to the non-SMP version, you will see that someone didn't spend a
year or two making changes to an earlier version and then quickly merge those
changes into 16.x code.  It is _not_ that easy.  But that isn't even the end
of this, as I would still say it is unreasonable for someone to copy the search
of crafty, in its entirety, along with the parallel stuff, and then use that in
a competition.  Or is it ok to modify perhaps 1% of a program (based on
man-hours of work invested in the original development vs the time spent on
changing something here and there) and then use this in a tournament?

Past ACM and WCCC events have said _no_.  I'm happy to see others use crafty as
a starting point for their own development.  I'm not so happy to see them then
enter this and compete against those that are doing _original_ computer chess
development.  In that case, why not just ask and enter crafty with my
permission, since that is _really_ what is playing anyway?




>Hans was honestly and admitted to use parts of this code. Are other programmers
>also so honest?
>
>Hans think a very nice human being and I to attack him is not OK !!!
>
>Best wishes
>Frank



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