ChessVibes publishes a balanced article re: Rybka

[Jeremy Bernstein]

Ordinarily, such an event wouldn't require much fanfare, but given the current climate, a bit of sanity is worth celebrating: http://www.chessvibes.com/reports/contr ... on-and-ban.

[Sean Evans]

Hi Jeremy,

I am not sure what you mean by a balanced article. All ChessVibes did is post information that is already available on the Internet without any significant analysis or conclusion. Anyone here could write a better article than CV did!

Cordially,

Sean

[Jeremy Bernstein]

Hi Jeremy,

I am not sure what you mean by a balanced article. All ChessVibes did is post information that is already available on the Internet without any significant analysis or conclusion. Anyone here could write a better article than CV did!

Cordially,

Sean

They commented on both sides of the debate, contacted representatives of both sides of the debate for comment and republished unskewed summaries of the arguments (noting their own role). Concluded that it's complicated, implied that they haven't got the technical expertise to sort it out themselves, and resisted the temptation to choose sides. Simple, informative, unsensational, honest.

In short, it's the sort of article which could get a few more people to actually read the evidence, compare the statements and claims of both sides and come to some informed conclusions, rather than relying on the frothy chaos that has characterized the discussion to date. I tend to think that the evidence speaks for itself, and that the more people who take the time to understand it, the better.

jb

[kingliveson]

Riis concludes by comparing UCI parameters, noting that Rybka lacks about
18 of 20 parameters possessed by Fruit (and adds a SearchDirection parameter).
Again this point seems bizarre; a minimally competent programmer should take
no more than 15 minutes to excise such parameters from the Fruit code (making
them their default values, if nothing else).

BB+ uses the term bizarre, but I'd say propaganda, because that's exactly what it is. Given that the ChessBase's opinion piece references C.W. and E.S. as consultants, whom I would like to believe are competent programmers, there's only one interpretation to that UCI parameter comparison -- it is meant to deceive and persuade non-programmers. A picture is worth a thousand words...I dig.

[LucenaTheLucid]

You're right Jeremy. Whether you believe right or wrong in this whole ordeal you have to appreciate this fact that someone reported on it without any bias.

[wgarvin]

I'm glad people like Mark Watkins continue tirelessly to refute the nonsense that certain people keep whipping up about this issue, and the stuff that Riis has now written.

The commenters on the chessvibes article though, fill me with despair. They sound like people from the Rybka forum. I doubt any of them has actually read the ICGA report, or the evidence considered by the panel.

[zwegner]

I'm glad people like Mark Watkins continue tirelessly to refute the nonsense that certain people keep whipping up about this issue, and the stuff that Riis has now written.

+10000

I certainly don't have the patience to do it, and Mark makes a much better response than I could've anyways. His PDF in response to Riis is simply excellent.

[Harvey Williamson]

I'm glad people like Mark Watkins continue tirelessly to refute the nonsense that certain people keep whipping up about this issue, and the stuff that Riis has now written.

The commenters on the chessvibes article though, fill me with despair. They sound like people from the Rybka forum. I doubt any of them has actually read the ICGA report, or the evidence considered by the panel.

They are the Tybka forum fanboys without a doubt who have clearly not read the evidence. the person posting as Hans is in fact Rybka team member jeroen Nooman.

[Jeremy Bernstein]

I'm glad people like Mark Watkins continue tirelessly to refute the nonsense that certain people keep whipping up about this issue, and the stuff that Riis has now written.

The commenters on the chessvibes article though, fill me with despair. They sound like people from the Rybka forum. I doubt any of them has actually read the ICGA report, or the evidence considered by the panel.

There is a culture, especially in the USA, which values believing your gut over the evidence of your senses. "Better strong and wrong than right and weak". Unfortunately, this culture has collided with the ICGA's academic sensibilities in a pretty ugly way, which can be best seen on the Rybka forum, but has been a general feature of this debate from the start.

I applaud the tireless efforts of some of the principles in this story in attempting to set the story straight, but this group of people (and I am not making a straw man argument, I just don't feel like typing their names right now) has stopped reading, listening or thinking critically, and I really think it's just a waste of everyone's time to try to convince them at this point. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it's counterproductive.

I don't know what the "court of public opinion" thinks about this: comments on chess vibes, chess.com or the css forum indicate that the "howling monkey" attitude at rybkaforum is not prevalent, but there are still plenty of people who refuse to read the evidence, or admit to not being qualified to understand it, but nevertheless voice strong opinions on the matter. In particular, that the entire affair was an attempt to blackmail Vas into releasing his source code. To a programmer, this sounds absurd. To a layman, maybe not.

This process requires closure, though, either in the form of an independent mediation instance to "confirm or overturn" the ICGA ruling, or in the form of a FSF legal action. I really hope for the latter, but I expect that we'll have neither, and I will just need to accept that there are things and people in this world, and in the chess community, which make my blood boil.

[BB+]

They commented on both sides of the debate, contacted representatives of both sides of the debate for comment and republished unskewed summaries of the arguments (noting their own role).

+1 (and it's not often that I give this)

either in the form of an independent mediation instance to "confirm or overturn" the ICGA ruling [...]

I think Don Beal is still an emeritus at Queen Mary. If Riis could track him down, and not be scared that he served on the ICGA board in decades previous, he would be another person as a possible mediator.

BB+ uses the term bizarre, but I'd say propaganda, because that's exactly what it is.

I was able to restrain my initial barbs (throughout) via a thorough re-writing process. Perhaps the best word here is "queerish" (having the double meaning of both simply "queer" or "odd", and alternatively "affected with nausea" -- a nice mix). I also am quite saddened that it seems VR is now relying on the fact that most of the matters are technical, and that he can bluff the masses about it.

The commenters on the chessvibes article though, fill me with despair. They sound like people from the Rybka forum. I doubt any of them has actually read the ICGA report, or the evidence considered by the panel.

The Internet can indeed tend to lead one to despair. I wonder if any of the more tech sites will pick up the issue. I can't imagine anyone with basic programming skills being too impressed by Riis/Rajlich.

His PDF in response to Riis is simply excellent.

There are a number of points that I could have improved. For instance, in the Summary (which I presumed would be quoted), instead of talking about a change of "language", I should have explicitly mentioned it was just a minor C/C# dialect issue. Various drafts linked to the QMUL plagiarism guidelines, and to answering his "sophomoric lawyering", I could have quoted their definition (#1) and also #10 [the latter is one of Riis's big points -- since Rajlich/ICGA differ on their rule interpretation, somehow he concludes this is the ICGA's negligence, rather than VR's fault].

I also failed to enumerate that the Report additionally didn't mention the "major" issue of the floating-point zero. And just reading the Report now, I also note that it too explicitly mentions: Note that neither Rajlich nor others have claimed actual Rybka 1.0 beta source code was ever released, so again I don't know where Riis gets the idea that Panel members would think differently with code reconstruction. For that matter (again I just realised this), the Panel members had to "vote" before the Report was even written -- how could they depend only on it? And as noted elsewhere, I could have added an Olympics doping analogy for the indirect/direct evidence question on move similarity.