Author: Fernando Villegas
Date: 04:55:17 02/18/99
Go up one level in this thread
On February 18, 1999 at 04:19:50, Bruce Moreland wrote: > >On February 17, 1999 at 15:20:37, Fernando Villegas wrote: > >>Of course by definition, but this only changes the place of the problem. Instead >>of wondering what a program should be to be considered a program by itself, now >>the question would be what a guy should be to be considered an author. If Bionic >>is different -yhe old discussion- his fathers are "authors". If not, the are >>not. So we arrive at the same point. So we need even more rules whcih will carry >>new boundaries to be defined at nauseaum. Perhaps some kind of torumament for >>second generation authors should be invented :-) > >I think there are some bad traps here. > >We have the following things that can be done to a freeware program: > >A1) Minor evaluation changes. >A2) Major evaluation and extension changes (plays very different). >A3) Gut the entire thing and leave nothing but the UI, essentially. > >We have a few things that secondary authors can do: > >B1) Sell it. >B2) Enter it in an ICCA tournament without original author's permission. >B3) Claim sole authorship. Probably nobody in the world could claim sole autorship in this or anything else. > >There has been some contention about whether the Bionic or Voyager guys did A1 >or A2. I don't think it matters much. In either case, B1, B2, and B3 are all >out of the question, in my opinion. OK. I agree. My point is and ever has been that THIS part of the history, the ego part, the guys trying to get any kind of advantages, is ever ugly, unfair, conflictive and even dirty, BUT that it is the price to be payed for progress as much the only way to stop such kind of things -that are not performed by all people, anyway- would be to make of each new idea and product something absolutely isolated, surrounded by sharpened hedges. > >If someone does A1, the original author is still the person most responsible for >the program, and deserves sole authorship, and the secondary author deserves a >minor credit if that. Yes. > >If they do A2, there is the potential for some major effort to have been done, >and even legitimate research and no need at all for recriminations. The >secondary author assumes the status of co-author. But in my opinion options B2 >and B3 are still out of the question. There is a lot more to a program than >eval and search extensions. There is a lot of infrastructure, *especially* in >Crafty, devoted to moving pieces around the board, hash table stuff, parallel >search, and setting up data structures that can be use to efficiently generate >evaluation terms. And not only that, there is the opening book compiler, and >the two forms of learning that Bob uses. > >Note that I am not necessarily ruling out A3 as a fine thing to do while still >doing some of the B's, but you'd have to wonder what is left over in the program >at that point, and I'd be very concerned that some of the strength-producing >elements of Crafty might be left over. You may as well just write your own >thing from scratch and hook it up to Winboard. Here we go again to the old point as how to determinate the boundary between new and old stuff. And how to aknowledge credit for each old thing that is left in any new thing. Of course, what is left in any technology is ever the very best thing. The credit list would be long like in movies, including even catterers and the chauffer. The esential thing to me is that thanks to this open Crafty surely a lot of people is working without need to reinvent things that were already invented by Bob. And if one of them claim credit for that, he will be considered like a guy claiming the invention of the wheel. What has happened to Bionic guys is a test of it. If they really tried to cheat and win an easy fame, they won another stuff from this comunity. Au revoir Fernando >bruce
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