Author: Jeremiah Penery
Date: 23:56:09 02/16/99
Go up one level in this thread
On February 16, 1999 at 22:05:37, Djordje Vidanovic wrote: >On February 16, 1999 at 20:54:20, Jeremiah Penery wrote: > >>On February 16, 1999 at 19:36:13, Fernando Villegas wrote: >> >><snip> >> >>>Maybe Bionic or Voyager have 99% of components from Crafty, but if the behaviour >>>is not like Crafty, then is not Crafty. A chess program is for playing chess and >>>so matters of style and strenght are the important ones, no how was done, how >>>many new or olds pieces has, etc. >> >><snip> >> >>This seems very wrong. For example, I can take Crafty source and add *ONLY TWO >>LINES* and make it play completely differently, yet still very strongly. But, I >>CAN NOT claim the program to be my own. Even though you wouldn't be able to >>tell it was Crafty by looking at the games it played, it still would be Crafty. >> >>As Dann said, if I take one of your articles and change a few words, it is still >>YOUR article, even if nobody would be able to tell you wrote it. >> >>Jeremiah > >At first glance what you just said does seem to be true, and it really is true, >but only applied to _static_ entities, such as articles, statues, hanging >gardens, stuffed birds, etc. However, when you deal with _dynamic_ entities, >where one little thing can change the behaviour of the _whole system_ (one thing >leading to another) then your line of reasoning is not correct. Thus, you may >have an engineer researching a prototype for 50 yrs and not finding the right >solution whereupon someone else comes along and by working on it for a couple of >years finds the little something that was missing, implements this little >something (watch out, all the works are there, the internal structure was >already present) and the prototype machine is working as it should have been in >the first place. (Now, all this is very much a "Gedanken" experiment so >beware.) Who do we credit with the prototype, the guy who set up the rig that >was not working, or not working the way it should have, or the new guy? What >I've just said is terrible, I know, but then all analogies limp, don't they, >they are all wobbly -- just as your analogy with that hypothetical article of >Fernando's is... I fail to see how it differs. In the case of a machine prototype or such, it is likely that many of the parts are either patented already by the original engineer, or, if it (the working version produced by a different engineer) still looks sufficiently like the original design, there may be some sort of lawsuit, if it can be proved that it was stolen from the original engineer. [I have some experience with the Patent & Trademark offices of the US, so I know pretty well how they work.] >There is an old maxim -- Ex nihilo nihil fit. "There is nothing new under the >sun" -- Bob Hyatt is only a link in a very long chain of general human thought, >and he came up with something new with reference to something else that he had >built on. The authors of Bionic did the same, and they acknowledged their >intellectual debt as is proper. AFAIK, it was not admitted until after it was already discovered...Please correct me if I am wrong. >But, bear in mind that they ***competed*** in >an official tourney -- the Dutch Open. Voyager, about which there has been so >talk, never took part in an official tourney, it was in the works, so to speak. >And then someone (there is only a limited number of people who could have done >that!) mustered up his morals and courage to give a copy of a completely >unfinished product, a program in the making, caught in the midst of tuning and >testing and trying out, with the bare essentials of the code implemented, a >program that would never have been used publicly as it was. That particular copy >had never taken part in an official tourney, nor did the author plan to do so. >What's the fuss then? The fuss is that Bob has a copyright on the Crafty code, which also says that all changes made to the source should become publicly available. By making programs by changing a few things in Crafty, there is a violation of copyright, not to mention the moral/ethical issues. >The author is, according to my knowledge, still working >on Voyager. It is not the old, uneven and Crafty-resembling version anymore. I >could not reproduce more than 20 or so percent of PVs corresponding to Crafty This is irrelevant. As I said above, I can add ONLY TWO LINES to the entire Crafty source and make it give less than 20% of the original Crafty's PVs. Or simply change a few numbers in the evaluation... >with Voyager 3.08a specially designed for the Fritz 5.32 interface... Voyager is >turning into a very interesting program, surely using some borrowed ideas, but >Bob did the same thing building up on the ideas he may have got while perusing >the source code of Chess 4.x or Coco, or whatever. I'm sure he built on the ideas, but I would be willing to bet that he did not simply copy-paste source code. >I know of at least two >programs that have stemmed from the Gnuchess source which are rightly considered >as full-fledged original programs now since they really bear no resemblence to >Gnu *anymore*. But they did at first... A lot of the problem is that people are using these Crafty clones to win tournaments against less highly developed programs. Nobody could reasonably expect to take a GNUChess clone to a tournament and win, unless they did a GREAT deal of work to make the program better (e.g. Comet). >And so the world goes on, and layers of >tradition settle one upon another, but one does not, and, indeed, should not >always start anew! That is called, in its widest sense, civilisation. > >Regards, >Djordje Jeremiah
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.