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Subject: Re: Disassembling = Unethical?

Author: Joseph Tadeusz

Date: 14:27:39 01/23/06

Go up one level in this thread


On January 23, 2006 at 17:17:17, Dann Corbit wrote:

>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.

I don't agree. I think the windows version of DEC creates high quality C code.
All that remains are the following steps:

 - identify important functions
 - identify important variables

A team of motivated people could easily reverse engineer a chess engine.

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

I agree that feelings would get hurt.

>
>>>
>>>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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