A Smoking Gun?
Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2010 5:44 pm
From BB report, Section 5.3.1:
What is meant here by use of the phrase "smoking gun"? Is BB suggesting that the similarity here is so peculiarly close that this is evidence of code copying? Thus, a "smoking gun"? BB's commentary is a bit terse and vague. The section title "smoking gun" is obviously suggestive, but what exactly is being suggested here?5.3.1 IPPOLIT peculiarly has a leftover condition in the updating of positional gain,
in that it first checks whether a move is a capture, and if not, it then checks
whether it is a capture (again!) and the captured piece is a pawn; the latter is
exactly a condition (among many) in Rybka’s code, though it does appear in
the same place (at the start). Also, Rybka does (many) other things here when
a move is a capture, whereas IPPOLIT does nothing in this case.
This “could” be harmless: for instance, the IPPOLIT testers might have
been just trying many different combos here, and didn’t make the last deletion
of redundant code. Perhaps humourously, this “copied” code (if it is that) never
actually does anything in the end...