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Subject: Re: Disassembling = Unethical?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 14:17:17 01/23/06

Go up one level in this thread


On January 23, 2006 at 16:59:33, Joseph Tadeusz wrote:

>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.

DCC and Boomerang are the two that I am aware of.  They spit out unintelligible
goo.

This link is pertinant to the thread:
http://www.program-transformation.org/Transform/LegalityOfDecompilation

>>
>>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?



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