Interesting and real Talkchess posts...or not!

[thorstenczub]

This really is the golden age of computer chess, from a commercial perspective. Programmers just have to wake up and realise that nobody plays chess on a PC anymore.

i have to agree with you tord. and IMO chris knows this. he ported his chess program to all kind of platforms.
beginning with ZX Spectrum and and and it finally came on market for mobiles.
of course at this time the smart mobile and tablet-pcs were not so much sold.

now the situation has changed. alone apple has sold millions of iphones and ipads.
the other companies try to continue this success story.
so chess programs are IMO really in a golden age.

chess on a tablet pc is THE most sensefull idea i can imagine.

just press on the square or the piece without have to use a mouse. thats what makes fun.

we do even have the first SMP chess program on the tegra2 tablet-platforms for android.

[orgfert]

...was REXCHESS by don dailey and Larry Kaufmann.

Yes, Don Dailey wrote REXCHESS.

[BB+]

Legally, ethically, there is no difference, but the one product is celebrated and the other assaulted.

It has been asserted there is both a legal and ethical difference.

I am probably out of my league with respect to legal issues, and in any case it seems very convoluted. For instance, the license (if any) you get with Rybka seems to depend on the re-distributor. I went to 3 major ones, and for none of them was I asked to click "I agree" not to reverse-engineer, etc., the product before being able to click "Confirm payment". One of the 3 had me click "I agree" about indemnity, etc., and one of the others had some boilerplate Terms and Conditions that included "no reverse-engineering", but I was never asked if I agreed to this. The validity of such "shrink-wrap" licenses is also a point of dispute [the most notable US case seems to have been decided on nuances of federal pre-emption, and was declined to be heard by the US Supreme Court]. The use of RE as a form of discovery is fairly clearly legal in the US (see the Galoob Game Genie case -- surely Galoob had to do RE on the Nintendo games to get useful codes for their product), while as I mentioned previously, the EU in its own funky manner seems to desire to prohibit it. I don't know about the laws in the Russian Federation.

As for ethics, it seems to depend on the intent of the author. Fabien seems, at least ex post facto to be OK with everything. As for VR, it would have been nice if (say) when Strelka first appeared he had made clear in no uncertain terms that he considered RE and re-use of "ideas" to be a violation of his rights. In reading the Rybka Forum (and perhaps I should review this all again), my impression with Strelka was more that he was: annoyed by the RE but realised it was not possible to stop (see also his general comments about RE); and that the recriminations against Strelka were that it re-used" code".

I'm not sure this is tongue in cheek (July 2007), but: http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforu ... ?pid=20650

SG: I mean, if you put ten engineers to work a year or two decompiling Rybka, you could probably get the source code back, but at that point buying the source from Vas would probably be cheaper (and give you a much more current version, and less legal trouble).
VR: You know, actually, if somebody wants to do this, it's not so bad. It's just the Rybka team's contribution to computer chess

As I say, I wouldn't push this quotation too far, w/o first tracking down any counterpoints from that time period.

[BB+]

CW: What profits?
JO: Maybe it is true for most programmers except Vasik/Rybka.

From the IEEE Spectrum "Game Boy" article (Feb 2007): "Last year, enthusiasts bought 2000 copies of the program, at €34 (about US $45) a pop." So in 2006, before hooking with ChessBase, there was already about $90K a year in sales.

The article continues:

He tried for a while to sell his own software. He and Iweta are still awash in ”I (heart) Rybka” pens, wall hangings, and other marketing tchotchkes. But the very qualities that brought him to Budapest turned out to disqualify him as a businessman. ”I just don’t care,” he says. ”I’m a software developer.” So he signed a contract with Convekta, a Russian-born, British-based company; it now handles the marketing, and it is also developing an interface between Rybka and other software products.

The company pays Rajlich a salary, freeing him to spend his days refining the next iteration of Rybka.

Annoyingly, the forum software rejected the "heart" symbol when I submitted it.

[hyatt]

Hyatt would never make it as a diplomat!

The big unanswered question to me is just why Hyatt believes that to be true?

Maybe he's looking at it from the perspective of academic research (a professor to the last!), and from that perspective, anyone who hasn't published research or at least their code, has done nothing for the pursuit of computer chess knowledge. Maybe he's also thinking about all the times that Crafty has been cloned, and claimed by somebody else, as their program. That has to leave a long standing bitter taste in your mouth.

But I don't believe that encompasses the whole spectrum of computer chess. There is a large base of CC fans, who make it all possible for research to continue, and chess programs to exist, outside a lab. Without the support of users, there would be no CC tournaments, no commercial programs, and no human vs computer matches, etc. There never would have been a Cray Blitz, either!

It may not be readily apparent to an academic like Robert, but without the support of users, CC would be going absolutely nowhere. Komodo, and all the other CC programs, support the CC users, whether they contribute to open source code and research papers, or not. The fact that they are free, is icing on our cakes, surely.

If you had simply read the complete thread, you would have discovered this was about "contributions to computer chess" which is also "contributions to computer science". To contribute, one has to provide something that advances the field in some fashion. An example is the infamous chapter by Slate in "Chess Skill in Man and Machine" which has been a blueprint for many a chess program over the years.

Vas has simply not contributed any information of any kind. Writing a program is not a contribution to computer chess. It does zero to further progress. It _is_ a contribution to chess in general, since any strong chess player contributes games and similar. But _not_ to computer chess.

The discussion started around the definition of the word "contribution" which is quite well defined and understood in academic circles. Even Intel publishes details about their chips that contribute to future chip designs by everyone. Ditto for AMD and others. If you reveal zero, and intentionally obfuscate program output to make it more difficult to figure out what it is doing, your "contribution" is <nil> since you are giving _nothing_ away.

That's all there was to it. In general, commercial programmers contribute nothing. Occasionally one does, and as an example, when Ed decided to retire, he published a lot of information about Rebel which will help others that are starting off quite a bit.

So read first, before trying to speculate on what I meant and why I wrote what I did. "context" can change the meaning of anything. As can a "lack thereof".

As far as the "users" go, that's a crock. What "users" were there in the 1970's? There were _no_ commercial chess programs. yet CC grew rapidly. What about the 80's? The commercial programs were _far_ weaker than the university-developed programs. Even into the 90's this was true, thanks to deep blue. Users are irrelevant to computer chess development. Those of us that want to improve computer chess do it without any user input required.

[Dave Mitchell]

More interest in CC means more CC programs will be created, more books will be published - including some like "Chess Skill in Man and Machine", more tournaments with more money, and ultimately more CC papers will surely be submitted. More people will stay interested in CC, due to the commercial chess programs marketing efforts.

They may not help the research effort, (although I believe Ed did), but they do provide a valuable marketing impetus, to CC. Who's to say that Vas won't release a lot of details about Rybka, when he retires, like Ed did with Rebel?

I read the earlier posts in the thread, but had to chuckle and ignore the argument about the meaning of "contribution". Life is too short for such arguments, imo.

[JohnS]

An example is the infamous chapter by Slate in "Chess Skill in Man and Machine" which has been a blueprint for many a chess program over the years.

Just curious. Why do you call Slate's paper infamous rather than famous?

[BB+]

if we assume that only half of the 5479 customers would have been willing to pay one dollar for it, it would add up to a substantial amount of money for just one month.

Obviously you don't think like Cozzie did.

Subject: Re: VOCCT 1
From: Anthony Cozzie
Message Number: 413657
Date: February 23, 2005 at 16:33:46
[...]
Zappa contains roughly 13,000 lines of C++ code (not counting Eugene's stuff). If I plug that into COCOMO (months = 2.4*KLOC^1.05), I get a development time of 3 years. At standard US Goverment contracting rates (60K/yr, multiplier 2.5) that equates to $450,000.
[...]
So if Arturo & I show up at the WCCC this year or the next, the total value of our entry is probably pushing $1M, and this would be dwarfed by some of the other contestants.

I'm not sure that his "multiplier" of 2.5 here is anything more than a randomly chosen number. Or that the time of grad students is typically valued even at 60K/yr.

[hyatt]

An example is the infamous chapter by Slate in "Chess Skill in Man and Machine" which has been a blueprint for many a chess program over the years.

Just curious. Why do you call Slate's paper infamous rather than famous?

I really meant nothing in particular by "infamous" as opposed to "famous". Perhaps "well-known" would have been a better descriptive term. Almost anyone writing a chess program in the late 70's or into the 80's knew that chapter verbatim...

[kingliveson]

Yes, I believe ippolit is hurting chess, just as incest hurts the gene pool. I know that Vas has a program much stronger than Rybka 4, but you and I will never see it so we have already been hurt.

Wait, how does he know, and a better question is "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"