Interesting and real Talkchess posts...or not!

[thorstenczub]

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?"

if a tree in a forrest falls, and there is nobody watching it, is the tree really falling ?
no observer, no action.

[thorstenczub]

IMO it has nothing to do with the cloners.

the pc's destroyed it completely.

all dedicated chess companies are dead.


fidelity bought by mephisto. mephisto bought by saitek.
saitek bought by mad catz. finished.

excalibur. finished.

novag. finished.

they are all dead.

the pc's destroyed the whole market. everything.

the situation we have NOW is a result of this destruction by pc-hardware.

when the grandmaster were defeated by the pc HARDWARE,
there was no tension anymore.
suddenly ALL men had no chance anymore.
computerchess in competition with humans suddenly made no SENSE
anymore.

it was IMO the hardware explosion that killed computerchess.

the business was destroyed by the fact that humans could not longer
stand the hardware. we were suddenly smashed away by machines.
software... was suddenly unimportant.
cause the hardware was so strong that even stupid chess programs
could make a win.

[BB+]

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.

I'm not sure that anything concerning IPPOLIT has been the controlling factor for any purported decision with withholding Rybka strength from the public. If there really be a stronger Rybka, it seems just as likely to me that Houdini et al. would induce VR to release it as the opposite.

[Uly]

if a tree in a forrest falls, and there is nobody watching it, is the tree really falling ?
no observer, no action.

Yet you can go days later to the forest and see the tree on the ground, isn't it then obvious that it did fall?

[thorstenczub]

if you go there, you observe it. but would the tree fall if you would not go ?

take the photons ... you let them fly through the



if you let them fly, 1 photon each day, HOW can the pattern be build ?
do the photons communicate with each other to know WHICH arera they should
fly ??

no observer. no action.

[Uly]

if you go there, you observe it. but would the tree fall if you would not go ?

Didn't the universe exist before someone was there to observe it? It did, as the observer was born in it.

no observer. no action.

Perhaps that would be more proof that God exists as an observer than that the tree doesn't fall.

[slobo]

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?"

if a tree in a forrest falls, and there is nobody watching it, is the tree really falling ?
no observer, no action.

Hi, Thorsten,

You have given a nice contribution to the thread, but in this one you are wrong. I´ll try to explain it by examples:
Example 1: I cannot see you in any moment ("no observer") but, in spite of this unfavorable fact, I know for sure, as 1+1=2, that you have to go to a bathroom at least ones a day.
Example 2: If I don´t post regulary to the forum ("no observer") it does not mean that I have become immortal (like those trees in KLO´s forest).

So, we know some things by simply knowing a general law. We may not know the exact moment when something hapen, but we may know that some things happen for sure.

Have a nice day.

SL

[Sentinel]

if you let them fly, 1 photon each day, HOW can the pattern be build ?
do the photons communicate with each other to know WHICH arera they should
fly ??

no observer. no action.

Photons as particles in the sense of what ppl suppose DO NOT EXIST.
There are certain properties of light waves that can be attributed to particles. This leads us to claim wave-particle duality. However, single photons in the sense of physical existence do not exist (this is exactly the meaning of uncertainty principle). You can not take a photon and let it fly, simple because it doesn't exist on its own.
Mind experiment in which you observe 1 photon flying through the hole is simply a logic fallacy.

[thorstenczub]

of course you can stretch the photons through the slots with a gap of a day, and wait until the
interference pattern appears although there were no waves that could interfere.

whatever photons are (existing or not) they can be made visible if you send them on photo paper behind the slots.

if you sent people through 2 doors, and picture the pattern behind those doors,
and now sent the people through 2 doors with 1 person each day, will you see similar patterns ?

[kingliveson]

Now this is very interesting as I was beginning to question the integrity of those whom I have long respected in the computer chess community given previous weird stance in light of overwhelming evidence to the contrary:

There are several issue concerning various programs that have raised a huge amount of controversy and have generated a lot of different viewpoints.

I would like to try to sort our the issues and attempt to bring a little clarity to the matter, and not in a ad-hoc manner but by just trying to provide a little direction to this dicussion with your help. I'm going to try to refrain from subjective comments on this particular post although I don't believe it's possible for anyone to be 100% objective about anything.

I think there are 2 major issues that we should consider separately, even though there may be some degree of overlap. One of them is purely legal (what you can legally get away with) and the other is ethical.

The legal issue is separate because it defines what you can get away with. I'm not going to focus on that here, because presumably there is little we can do about that, unless we are directly involved. For example I don't think we need to have a huge discussion about whether Vas violated GPL, and our opinion won't change that anyway. There is strong evidence that he did, therefore I'm not sure discussing it will change that.

From the eithical point of view, I think WE need to decide what is acceptable and what is not. I say WE, as fellow members of the computer chess community. Let's use Ipolitto as a talking point.

I believe there are 3 basic points of view on this that pretty much define how people feel about it.

1. Ippolito is a completely orginal program.

2. Ippolito is heavily based on reverse engineering Rybka 3 and this is wrong.

3. Ippolito is heavily based on reverse enginnering Rybka 3 and so what?

Although I think these represent the major points of view, they are mixed in various degrees. For example you might believe that Ippolito is mostly orginal but with some ideas taken from Rybka 3. And the degree of your belief in the wrongness of this will vary from person to person.

These 3 points of view can be broken down into 2 issues, whether Ippolito is orginal or not. I'm not going to address this here because I want to focus on what I think is the most important issue, the ethics of it.

So let's start with the assumption that we have identified a program that is not a source code clone of something original, but is heavily based on it. Let's also assume there are no legal issues. If there are, that of course is a separate matter with its own considerations.

Is this acceptable? Should we as the computer chess community endorse this behavior, or discourage it?

I think THAT is what we need to decide. We all have our various viewpoints on this which I think should be respected, but I think this is really at the heart of the matter and what we SHOULD be talking about but rarely do.

Hello Don,

Doesn't this argument invalidate the Rybka 4 is different from Rybka 3 is different from Rybka beta argument?

Meaning that if Rybka 1 was poisoned then mere version distance does not allow Rybka 4 to escape scrutiny.

So you would have no problem with this best of engine being represented at various tournaments? That seems difficult to accept if the origin of the engine was unethical. Why would you be alright with that?

Later.

Yes, Rybka 4 is just a different version of Rybka (or Fruit) and should not be allowed to compete unless the Fruit author gives permission to let Rybka represent it.

In theory Vas could write an entirely new program and in fact I think he has. I can imagine that Vas at some point decided that he needed to diverge from Fruit as quickly as possible and that is what he probably did. He probably blundered by leaving some small bits unchanged, such as the UCI interface parts because presumably that is still identifiable.

However, if Rybka 1 is really a version of Fruit, then it's pretty difficult to accept Rybka 4 as not being so too. So whether it's an acceptable rewrite or not does not matter because he ruined his credibility.

I have in fact written chess programs that had very little in common and shared almost no code, and I don't think anyone would be able to detect similarities unless it was coding style. Nevertheless, I would not be allowed to play both versions, even if I considered them completely different.