Author: James Robertson
Date: 11:32:16 02/15/99
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On February 15, 1999 at 11:57:19, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On February 15, 1999 at 10:13:49, Jeff Anderson wrote: > >>It doesn't send the 'Hello from Crafty x.xx' at the beginning does it? >>Jeff >> >>On February 15, 1999 at 07:56:53, Fernando Villegas wrote: >> >>>On February 15, 1999 at 05:43:19, Jeff Anderson wrote: >>> >>>>I've read at the Gambitsoft site that a new chess engine called Bionic has >>>>source that may be almost completely copied from Crafty. I have heard nothing >>>>about this on CCC. Can give me the whole of the story? >>> >>>The whole story is more like a full history. You arrived too late. You are like >>>a guy saying " I have heard nothing about Titanic, what happened to it?" Well, >>>this is too long to reduce, but maybe we can say that a long discussion followod >>>Bionic appearance as much some people thought it was not very ethical to win a >>>tournament with a program that supposedly is scarcely something more than Crafty >>>and made use of a tehcnique that gave to it an enourmous advantage. From there >>>followed a weually loing thread about what should be a parameter to stablish a >>>difference between a program and his father-program. And so and so. >>>Take a look at post posted 3 to 4 weeks ago. >>>fernando > >Just wait a few days. I'll give you _another_ eye-popping revelation. There >is _another_ new program that appears to be a nearly line-for-line copy of >crafty. It is very strong, and the people testing it have _no idea_ that it >really is crafty. Who? wait for another day as I have some more comparisons >to do. But I can tell you that many of the character strings in this engine >have simply been converted to "German". But the engine is the same, the book >is the same, the hashing is the same, the learning files are the same, the >binary book format is the same, the constant bitmap patters (pre-initialized by >the compiler) are the same, the procedure names are the same, and the list goes >on. > >Really sad news, IMHO... > >But it seems some folks have zero morals... I would suggest you stop releasing the source to Crafty. I must admit that a lot of what I learned about chess engines came from Crafty and EXchess (i.e. the Winboard interrupt code; in my entire life I would never have thought of that), but most things can be done as well or better by descriptions. I.e., my entire rotated bitboard engine was based on Tim Foden's emails in English (not C++) before I ever downloaded Crafty source.... and I am much, much happier to have my *own* bitboard engine that I understand inside and out than one copied from Crafty.... If there must be free source for beginners, use EXchess as it is very easy to understand and is weak enough to probably not be renamed and entered into a WMCCC. James
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