Fabien's open letter to the community

General discussion about computer chess...
Terry McCracken
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by Terry McCracken » Thu Jan 27, 2011 7:57 pm

Chris Whittington wrote:
Uly wrote:
What is the 'bomb'? I only see Fabien agreeing with Hyatt that 'If [he does] _exactly_ the same thing [in mailbox], because [he copies] the code and then adapt[s] it to bitboard, [he doesn't] call that "original"'.
Hyatt is doing a cheat argument when he talks about mailbox/bitboard conversions.

Hyatt refers to his own conversion of Cray Blitz to Whatever (I forget the name) and calls the conversion copying.
In this case Hyatt wants to "copy" the original, perhaps with some additions optimisations along the way.

But the argument is about person A "copying" person B's program, "using ideas" from B's program.
In this case A does *not* want to "copy" the original, and he will definitely want his own ideas in there as well.

The act of wanting/not wanting to "copy" makes all the difference. Maybe by clean room, maybe by making a spec, maybe by total data structure change, certainly by using the *ideas* and not the code.

Hyatt's attempt to use his own experience as a universal template is invalid in the context.
Whittington, compared to Dr. Hyatt you're a hack and unlike Dr. Hyatt have no concept of integrity.
AFAIC, all the clones, derivitives and Rybka should be flushed to sea.

hyatt
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by hyatt » Thu Jan 27, 2011 9:51 pm

Chris Whittington wrote:
Uly wrote:
What is the 'bomb'? I only see Fabien agreeing with Hyatt that 'If [he does] _exactly_ the same thing [in mailbox], because [he copies] the code and then adapt[s] it to bitboard, [he doesn't] call that "original"'.
Hyatt is doing a cheat argument when he talks about mailbox/bitboard conversions.
What on earth are you talking about. The continual claim here is that Rybka is bitboards, fruit is not, they can't be the same. The conversion from mailbox to bitboard is too difficult. The conversion _I_ did in 1994 was _exactly_ this. I wanted to start to work on a bitboard engine. I took Cray Blitz, ran it thru a FORTRAN-to-C compiler, and cleaned that up. I then started to convert the thing to bitboards. And over time, I rewrote substantial parts as I wanted to use a recursive search rather than the iterated version we had in Cray Blitz. But the original conversion did not change the entire program. Search was unchanged. Move ordering and move selection code was unchanged. Code to deal with extensions, with hashing, etc were all unchanged. Parts of the move generator were changed since the board representation was altered, but this was not a huge effort. The eval was the most difficult, but I found it changed a good bit syntactically, but _not_ semantically. One continues to evaluate the same things, using the same weights, but using different comparisons and such.

That is a derivative work, period. Using bitboards to justify rybka 1 is pretty disingenuous, IMHO. It is an argument no person actually doing chess programming will consider for a minute. How many changed from an 8x8 board, to something else, to 0x88? New programs? Hardly. The better the programmer, the easier that is to do in fact...




Hyatt refers to his own conversion of Cray Blitz to Whatever (I forget the name) and calls the conversion copying.
In this case Hyatt wants to "copy" the original, perhaps with some additions optimisations along the way.

But the argument is about person A "copying" person B's program, "using ideas" from B's program.
In this case A does *not* want to "copy" the original, and he will definitely want his own ideas in there as well.
Only problem is, more than "ideas" were copied. Blocks of code were copied. And hand-waving is not going to make that go away anytime soon it would appear. Particularly now that Fabien has stepped into the discussion.

The act of wanting/not wanting to "copy" makes all the difference. Maybe by clean room, maybe by making a spec, maybe by total data structure change, certainly by using the *ideas* and not the code.
Bunch of nonsense. You either copy or you don't. Copying without wanting to copy, not copying but wanting to copy? All crapola.


Hyatt's attempt to use his own experience as a universal template is invalid in the context.
However, everything you wrote is nonsensical and irrelevant in any context...

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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by hyatt » Thu Jan 27, 2011 9:52 pm

orgfert wrote:
Chris Whittington wrote:
Uly wrote:
What is the 'bomb'? I only see Fabien agreeing with Hyatt that 'If [he does] _exactly_ the same thing [in mailbox], because [he copies] the code and then adapt[s] it to bitboard, [he doesn't] call that "original"'.
Hyatt is doing a cheat argument when he talks about mailbox/bitboard conversions.

Hyatt refers to his own conversion of Cray Blitz to Whatever (I forget the name) and calls the conversion copying.
In this case Hyatt wants to "copy" the original, perhaps with some additions optimisations along the way.

But the argument is about person A "copying" person B's program, "using ideas" from B's program.
In this case A does *not* want to "copy" the original, and he will definitely want his own ideas in there as well.

The act of wanting/not wanting to "copy" makes all the difference. Maybe by clean room, maybe by making a spec, maybe by total data structure change, certainly by using the *ideas* and not the code.

Hyatt's attempt to use his own experience as a universal template is invalid in the context.
What about frankenstein code -- a patchwork copied from two or three programs, modified to fit together, but to form a fundamentally new and proprietary idea?

A copy is a copy. That's the key point here. Even if you copy from 3 different sources. Students do this all the time. We call it "plagiarism" where there is a single source that was copied, or a dozen...

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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by BB+ » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:27 pm

The fact that Rybka is commercial and closed-source is irrelevant
Fabien seemed to indicate that "commercial" was of (ethical/moral) import to him (hmm, just like the IPPOLIT rants against "Capitalists"?). Then again, if "closed-source" weren't also of interest, I'm not sure if the Gnu GPL was the best choice of a license.

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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by Jeremy Bernstein » Thu Jan 27, 2011 11:41 pm

BB+ wrote:
The fact that Rybka is commercial and closed-source is irrelevant
Fabien seemed to indicate that "commercial" was of (ethical/moral) import to him (hmm, just like the IPPOLIT rants against "Capitalists"?). Then again, if "closed-source" weren't also of interest, I'm not sure if the Gnu GPL was the best choice of a license.
I was speaking more to one of the favorite talking points of the pro-Rybka camp: that the heinousness of any effort to learn the inner workings of Rybka is compounded by the fact that it is commercial/closed-source software (and therefore somehow subject to special rules), that reverse-engineering, emulation, etc. is therefore a direct assault on the ability of an entrepreneur to feed his family (and not a "victimless crime" like pillaging GPL source code), that doing so discourages others from following in those same commercial footsteps, ruining the possibilities of a happy hobbyist future full of strong chess engines. All off which I personally classify as bullshit, both philosophically and empirically.

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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by hyatt » Fri Jan 28, 2011 12:12 am

Jeremy Bernstein wrote:
BB+ wrote:
The fact that Rybka is commercial and closed-source is irrelevant
Fabien seemed to indicate that "commercial" was of (ethical/moral) import to him (hmm, just like the IPPOLIT rants against "Capitalists"?). Then again, if "closed-source" weren't also of interest, I'm not sure if the Gnu GPL was the best choice of a license.
I was speaking more to one of the favorite talking points of the pro-Rybka camp: that the heinousness of any effort to learn the inner workings of Rybka is compounded by the fact that it is commercial/closed-source software (and therefore somehow subject to special rules), that reverse-engineering, emulation, etc. is therefore a direct assault on the ability of an entrepreneur to feed his family (and not a "victimless crime" like pillaging GPL source code), that doing so discourages others from following in those same commercial footsteps, ruining the possibilities of a happy hobbyist future full of strong chess engines. All off which I personally classify as bullshit, both philosophically and empirically.

I took Fabien's comment as "I would be more pissed if this is a commercial project that makes money from my effort without paying me a penny" and "I would not mind if someone took my program and continued the open-source development and not selling the thing." Clearly the former is a bit more distasteful than the latter, from several perspectives... I would agree that the former is better than the latter. But even the latter is not acceptable if the program doesn't remain open-source to comply with the original GPL intent...

BB+
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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by BB+ » Fri Jan 28, 2011 12:14 am

Since I'm not at all an expert in CC I must tell you that it would be strange if I would now discuss anything with you. My interest came from psychology. I wished that I could inspire a debate about the given points. Thanks for now.
I've always wondered why he haunts chess fora..

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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by kingliveson » Fri Jan 28, 2011 1:53 am

Why does anyone even care if a 5 year old program is a clone (derivative work)?
PAWN : Knight >> Bishop >> Rook >>Queen

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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by Jeremy Bernstein » Fri Jan 28, 2011 1:57 am

kingliveson wrote:Why does anyone even care if a 5 year old program is a clone (derivative work)?
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. How about this: :|

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Re: Fabien's open letter to the community

Post by kingliveson » Fri Jan 28, 2011 2:07 am

Jeremy Bernstein wrote:
kingliveson wrote:Why does anyone even care if a 5 year old program is a clone (derivative work)?
I don't know whether to laugh or cry. :|
Seriously, I want people to pause for a second, and assess in midst of all the noise...look at what has happened to the chess community in the last few years. Who is the villain, and what exactly is the ultimate end game that we seek...?!
PAWN : Knight >> Bishop >> Rook >>Queen

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