Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Disassembling = Unethical?

Author: Joseph Tadeusz

Date: 13:59:33 01/23/06

Go up one level in this thread


On January 23, 2006 at 15:39:04, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On January 21, 2006 at 20:13:57, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On January 21, 2006 at 20:09:43, Uri Blass wrote:
>>
>>>On January 21, 2006 at 17:53:53, David H. McClain wrote:
>>>
>>>>On January 21, 2006 at 12:45:04, Rolf Tueschen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>Please read here and join the debate:
>>>>>
>>>>>http://www.talkchess.com/forums/2/message.html?203547
>>>>
>>>>Rolf,
>>>>
>>>>It may be everything stated in that post but I am not naive enough to think
>>>>Rybka has not been disassembled and reverse engineered by as many professional
>>>>and many amatuer authors you can think of, Russian or otherwise.
>>>>
>>>>There is money at stake.  DHM
>>>
>>>I do not think that there is much money in chess.
>>>
>>>Everybody that I talk with him tell me that people who can earn money from chess
>>>programs can earn a lot more from other things.
>>>
>>>I also doubt if disassembling rybka is the the best way to get a strong chess
>>>program and it is possible that people who are so smart to be able to do it and
>>>understand the assembler code of rybka may be also smart enough to generate
>>>something better in less time.
>>>
>>>Uri
>>
>>I can add that in the past genius dominated for years by a big margin.
>>
>>people also could disassemble genius at that time and in that time it was
>>possible to earn more money from chess programming.
>>
>>The fact that for years no program came close to genius suggest that
>>disassembling and reverse engineering is not so easy.
>
>I think that for a large system (e.g. 500K exe or bigger) it will be harder to
>disassemble and recreate than to write from scratch.
>
>Disassembled binary instructions will form a huge volume of information.
>
>A few lines of C can expand into a large volume of assembly.


There are tools that translate executables directly into C code.


>
>The optimizer will do all sorts of crazy things with the code .. writing jump
>tables and lifting expressions, etc.  All the comments are also boiled out of
>the code, along with all meaningful names.
>
>To me, it would take the fun out of it to do it that way.  Why bother?









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.