World's Best Chess Engine Outlawed and Disqualified 315
An anonymous reader writes "Rybka, the winner of the last four World Computer Chess Championships, has been found guilty by a panel of 34 chess engine programmers of plagiarizing two open-source chess engines: Crafty and Fruit. The governing body of the WCCC, the International Computer Games Association, is even demanding that Rybka's author — the international chess master and MIT graduate Vasik Rajlich — returns the trophies and prize money that he fraudulently won. Rybka will no longer be allowed to compete in the World Championships, and the ICGA is asking other tournaments around the world to do the same."
The obvious question (Score:5, Insightful)
If he was just ripping off two other engines, why did his win?
Sounds like he at least made improvements to them, and isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about? In fact, the article even acknowledges "ICGA isn’t even disqualifying Rybka because it copies Fruit — rather, it’s simply upset that Rajlich claims his engine is original, and refuses to give credit where it’s due." Okay, so maybe he should have given the other coders credit, but why should that disqualify him from winning? He still won. He didn't cheat. He didn't steal the code from the other engines (it was open source). His biggest offense is denying the other coders credit.
I think he should have to share the prize with the other coders (since they contributed code to the final product). But it still doesn't take away from the fact that his fork won. It doesn't justify taking away the win, as if he had cheated. His engine is still the best, open source code and all.
And, nothing against FOSS, but why on earth would you even release code designed for competition as open source, BTW? Aren't you essentially unzipping your fly and telling you competitors all your secrets? Couldn't releasing the source code wait until after the software was "retired" from competition?
Re:The obvious question (Score:5, Insightful)
Because he committed plagiarism, plain and simple.
Re:The obvious question (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Rybka’s source code has never been available, so reverse engineering and straight-up move-evaluation comparison was used to analyze the originality of Rajlich’s chess engine.
I don't see how anyone can claim plagiarism if they haven't seen source code.
Re:The obvious question (Score:4, Interesting)
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FTFA:
To come to this rather epic and libelous conclusion, the ICGA assembled a 34-person panel of programmers who have competed in past championships to analyze Rybka. Unfortunately, Rybka’s source code has never been available, so reverse engineering and straight-up move-evaluation comparison was used to analyze the originality of Rajlich’s chess engine. The panel unanimously agreed that newer versions of Rybka are based on Fruit — and worse, that the early beta versions were based on Cra
Re:Come Clean (Score:4, Insightful)
What if someone made it financially tenable for him to show his code?
"Oh. You did in fact innovate. Okay, we're sorry. But we won't take back the reputation tsunami we unleashed on you."
Anyone see parallels with the whole DHS theme of accuse first and question later?
Re:Come Clean (Score:4, Informative)
Let's see, should we take the word of Ken Thompson (yes that one), who according to the fine article seems to have been on the investigative panel, or the word of a random slashdot troll? Duhhh...
Actually neither. We should Read The Fine Reports.
Beyond the plain expression of the program, there are lots if artifacts which come through from source to binary. Even if two progammers start in the same language to develop the same algorithm to solve the same problem they will normally end up with great differences. The exceptions are the stuff of legends [livinginternet.com], and we are talking about 20 line long assembly programs. One programmer will choose an integer because it's big enough, another a long because the variable will mostly be used with other longs. This choice will not be optimised out of existence.
Looking at the report, it seems they used various different artifacts and clearly showed similarity between the programs.
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Or he can get a lawyer and sue them for defamation and/or libel if what they are claiming isn't true. If it isn't, I am sure that he is already talking to a lawyer if there is no basis in the claim.
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- They empaneled as the "jury" a bunch of assholes
Ad hom
who were predisposed to want Rajlich banned from competition (he kept beating them, four competitions in a row).
I know a lot of competitors and they don't want people who beat them banned.
Idle speculation and ad homs help nothing.
"except it's not a financially tenable move."
They could get a third party to analyze and compare.
And there are striking similarities in behavior.
Also, why are you overlooking the fact that they reverse engineered it and found
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Similarities alone don't mean plaigarism. Logic can be gleaned from open source code, then applied to other code, perhaps engines. So long as copyright isn't violated, and licensing strictures aren't violated, reading someone's code, understanding the logic, then re-writing it is a hallowed action. For arguments supporting this, go to Groklaw, understand what BSD is (or read about the AT&T-Regents of UCB litigation), and so forth. Ask RMS.
Logic and code might or might not be two different things. He mig
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Is this because the compiler does similar things to function calls? It's really NOT proof until you see the source. I can write a lot of code that compilers will optimize to the exact same bytecode. It's not really convincing without *source*.
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I can write the same code set, alter it significantly, enough to easily pass the test of copyright, do a make, and have the results be identical in every possible way.
Approaching the logic of a chessboard layout, once having viewed open source code, I could rewrite it to yours, or anyone else's satisfaction. This is without reverse engineering the code, rather, following its logic and using a mime-- but satisfactory analog-- of what it does. Other concepts, like UI, may have protections, but I can alter the
Re:The obvious question (Score:4, Informative)
First off: would it kill you to learn some basic HTML? Hard to separate out your comments when you're too lame to even italicize.
I know a lot of competitors and they don't want people who beat them banned.
Idle speculation and ad homs help nothing.
Empanel the losers from the competition on a witch hunt against the winner. Sounds like a dick move to me. Definitely doesn't pass the smell test.
They could get a third party to analyze and compare.
Why, precisely, should the Rybka team have to pay for that? It's the ICGA that should have been the ones doing this. FIRST.
And there are striking similarities in behavior.
You can walk into any chess tournament and see "striking similarities in behavior" between members of the same chess club/team, or between players of equal skill. Chess is a logical game, relying on logical formulations. Eventually, like Checkers and Othello were, it'll be solved. The closer the programs get to solving it, the more moves alike they'll make. "Similarities in behavior" of mathematical problem-solving prove nothing. If anything, the fact that his program beat - rather than drew to - the other programs ought to prove that he was NOT using their source code.
by your argument, opening moves in chess would have been the same for hundreds of years.
Funny you should mention that.
There are a grand total of 10 logical chess opening moves (8 pawns, 2 knights). Opening with knights has been derided as downright silly for centuries; the only "variation" there comes when it's immediately followed by a pawn push alongside, putting it back into "standard" opening land of a Kingside or Queenside gambit. Openings that begin with the A,H,B,G pawns are rightly derided as virtually useless. Even opening with the C and F pawns is viewed as akin to suicide, since it allows the opponent to open straight into the middle virtually uncontested.
Queen's Gambit openings, of various sorts, have dominated the arena since the early 1400's. The Italian opening was the favorite kingside method for over 300 years, until the Ruy Lopez opening passed it up in popularity. The entirety of "Black Openings" in modern chess for the past 500 years have been attempts to devise responses to these three methods of attack.
So now that I've given you a lesson, run back to your checkers board. The grownups are discussing things.
Re:The obvious question (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who is no chess master but can count, you are wrong. Those horsies move in Ls and each one has two possible Ls he could move into . Plus the pawns can move one spot or two spots. So that is 8 more moves. Up to 20 already. There might be more, but I am too busy playing Go to count.
Re:The obvious question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The obvious question (Score:4, Insightful)
Open source does not mean free of copyright. Furthermore, many open source licenses depend on copyright enforcement. Furthermore, claiming someone else's create as your own is fraudulent at best.
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You're completely wrong. The source is indeed copyrighted. Additional permission to copy is granted by the license, usually on the condition that attribution is preserved.
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Did you read the original statement from the ICGA? The one including the analysis?
Oh right, this is /.
Nevermind.
straight shooter with upper management written all (Score:2)
Taking credit for others work is just part of the job!
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His biggest offense is denying the other coders credit.
Isn't that enough?
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Re:The obvious question (Score:5, Insightful)
If he refused to disclose that he used open source code then he most likely violated the terms of the open source license and therefore did indeed cheat. Open Source [wikipedia.org] is not the same as Public Domain [wikipedia.org].
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Going to the Rybka web site www.rybkachess.com there does not seem to be a way to download the source code, which would be required for releases under the GPL, assuming there is validity to the claim that he's copied other open source efforts.
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If he doesn't distribute the binary, he needn't release the source.
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On the Rybka website you can buy the current version of either Rybka 4 for 36 Euros or Deep Rypka 4 for 65 Euros.
If these downloads contain any of the stolen code in their binaries this definitely counts as distribution.
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With the GPL you at least have to include an offer to ship the source with the binary, the user can't be expected to guess.
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Is it in the rules of these competitions that entries shall conform to the terms of software licenses?
If so, ban the cheater. (After establishing his code does in fact incorporate code from other sources and that he has violated the terms of the license on that code.)
If not, sounds like the situation Moryath described above. He was too good, so a few spoiled brats are taking their chess sets and going home.
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Is it in the rules of these competitions that entries shall conform to the terms of software licenses?
If so, ban the cheater. (After establishing his code does in fact incorporate code from other sources and that he has violated the terms of the license on that code.)
If not, sounds like the situation Moryath described above. He was too good, so a few spoiled brats are taking their chess sets and going home.
Except of course he could comply with the OS license (assuming it's GPL'd) without any acknowledgment as long as he doesn't distribute it.
So I agree with you, unless the rules stipulated 100% original code, what's the issue other than he was better at refining code than the others who had eh same code available?
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So, is the International Computer Games Association an organization to promote OSS?
And is the World Computer Chess Championship about finding the most powerful chess computer or promoting open source software?
I'm not familiar with either organization, so I'm not sure. I don't understand what "cheating" means in this particular case. If it was found that Viswanathan Anand had learned the
Re:The obvious question (Score:5, Informative)
Cheating, in this case, means violating the rules of the championship:
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Not if you claim to be 100% unique.
Re:The obvious question (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily, most Open Source Software (OSS) licenses (eg. GPLv2, EPL, etc.) only kick in on redistribution since you need the license to not be in violation of someone's copyright. You can USE all the OSS you want without complying with the license if you don't redistribute it. On top of that some OSS Licenses don't require that you disclose that there is OSS in your redistributable nor do they require you to provide source. (eg. 3-clause BSD).
In this case however, he's clearly distributing the binaries. Fruit appears to be LGPLv2.1 and Crafty has some goofball custom pseudo-oss license that requires attribution. So if he did copy the code and redistribute he's not complying with the licenses and in violation of copyright law.
I don't find it all that unusual that 2 different good chess programs might make similar decisions, and they don't have the source to compare so unless someone is going to sue and do discovery the claim of plagiarism is (IMO) premature.
The courts exist to settle just these sorts of conflicts, and banning him on supposition is questionable.. IANAL....
Whether he improved on them is irrelevant (Score:2)
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I don't think you understand what open source means... Especially once you add Microsoft into the mixture.
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Your house is unlocked. Anyone can use it. Dumbass.
Open Source - "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means"
Just because something is released under an open source license doesn't mean anyone can copy it. Copyright doesn't go away just because you release something under an open source license.
Re:Whether he improved on them is irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
He's using a funny way of not redistributing binaries, then:
http://www.rybkachess.com/index.php?auswahl=Purchase+Rybka [rybkachess.com]
Re:Whether he improved on them is irrelevant (Score:5, Informative)
A) As was already pointed out, he sells the binary engine, so he did redistribute it.
B) The rules of the competition require disclosure of any used third party libraries or components. Since he didn't disclose this usage, he violated the competition rules regardless of whether he was complying with the license conditions or not.
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Re:The obvious question (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing wrong with reusing other people's work with permission. But claiming that you made it (i.e. plagiarizing) isn't.
Also, Fruit 2.1 was released as GPL 2. Rybka is not, so it's a violation of copyright. And Crafty's license also doesn't permit the way Rybka used its source.
Re:The obvious question (Score:5, Informative)
Right in main.c
Crafty, copyright 1996-2010 by Robert M. Hyatt, Ph.D., Associate Professor
of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Crafty is a team project consisting of the following members. These are the people involved in the continuing development of this program, there are no particular members responsible for any specific aspect of Crafty.
* Michael Byrne, Pen Argyle, PA.
* Robert Hyatt, University of Alabama at Birmingham
* Tracy Riegle, Hershey, PA.
* Peter Skinner, Edmonton, AB Canada.
* Ted Langreck
All rights reserved. No part of this program may be reproduced in any form or by any means, for other than your personal use, without the express written permission of the authors. This program may not be used in whole, nor in part, to enter any computer chess competition without written permission from the authors. Such permission will include the requirement that the program be entered under the name "Crafty" so that the program's ancestry will be known.
Copies of the source must contain the original copyright notice intact.
Any changes made to this software must also be made public to comply with the original intent of this software distribution project. These restrictions apply whether the distribution is being done for free or as part or all of a commercial product. The authors retain sole ownership and copyright on this program except for 'personal use' explained below.
Personal use includes any use you make of the program yourself, either by playing games with it yourself, or allowing others to play it on your machine, and requires that if others use the program, it must be clearly identified as "Crafty" to anyone playing it (on a chess server as one example). Personal use does not allow anyone to enter this into a chess tournament where other program authors are invited to participate. IE you can do your own local tournament, with Crafty + other programs, since this is for your personal enjoyment. But you may not enter Crafty into an event where it will be in competition with other programs/programmers without permission as stated previously.
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Copyright and plaigarism are two different things. Even if you expand upon and improve other peoples ideas, it's plaigarism if you do not credit them.
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Due to the whole derivative works clause that'd still be a matter of copyright as well.
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At least one of the engines is GPL. Rybka is not. Ipso facto, there is copyright violation occurring.
He did not combine them. (Score:4, Informative)
He didn't even do that, he combined two separate opensource engine making one better engine.
According to the allegations, he did not combine two open-source programs into a super-bot. They claim that the current version of his bot (Rybka) is a copy of Fruit, and an earlier version of his software was a copy of Crafty.
As you said, he closed-sourced them and claimed them as his own without giving attribution -- thereby breaking the software licenses of at least one of them (Fruit), which is GPL.
Re:The obvious question (Score:4, Informative)
Well, it seems that Fruit [fruitchess.com] is open-source in the sense that people can look at the codebase, but it is not FOSS. The license text (see, e.g. readme in this tarfile [fruitchess.com]) says:
Indeed it looks like a commerical product that you are meant to pay for. Rajlich's engine is closed-source and also commercial [rybkachess.com]. He is not making his code available, so even if Fruit were, say, released under the GPL, he would be in violation of the license. But in fact Fruit is "all rights reserved" so if Rajlich took code from it then he is blatantly violating copyright, and thus breaking the law.
I would think that the competition has a blanket ethics rule that says that you cannot win by breaking the law. So Rajlich, if he did indeed appropriate code, doesn't deserve the wins. (Yes, he obviously did ~something~ to improve upon Fruit, but he still cheated.)
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Of course, this is based on the assumption that he actually used the source from Fruit, which is pretty hard to actually verify when his source code is not available.
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Many competitions have rules regarding dishonorable behavior. If he did use substantial amounts of open-source code without crediting the original authors as seems to be the case, that would be plainly dishonorable and thus grounds for disqualification.
As for the open source aspect, in this case a quick skim of the Fruity site seems to indicate (it's not very clearly worded) that it was initially open source during development and then went to a closed/commercial model after it had some wins under its belt
Oops. Crafty and Fruit, not Fruity (Score:2)
Oops, my brain mashed up the two likely ripped off engines in to one. Crafty and Fruit, not Fruity.
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Sounds like he at least made improvements to them, and isn't that what open source is supposed to be all about?
Having open source also helps.
This guy has closed the source and sells the compiled result.
Why "Chess Engine" Programmers? (Score:2)
First, there is the question of if he is falsely claiming credit. Second, is whether or not his is the best.
While there are nearly infinite moves in chess, there are not infinite ways of winning at chess. Last I heard, most systems use a scoring system to evaluate moves. And based on a final score tally, they make a decision. This is the "evidence" they have. But I would submit this to a group of non-chess playing programmers (who are unbiased as to who plays chess better).
Submitting the Fruit engine a
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What you say is completely disconnected from what actually happened. The conviction didn't happen by observing the engine, the conviction happened because the panel reverse engineered the binary exacutable and found a huge similarity, including exactly identical implementations of non-obvious functions, identical bugs and identical dead code in the commercial engine and the opens source engines.
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come out stronger if it didn't need to rely on obscurity
Yeah, that's a great idea when applied to cryptography. Not so much when you're talking trade secrets.
Best chess engine (Score:4, Interesting)
No Rybka, but Houdini:
http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm [cruxis.com]
Rybka/Houdini played a 40-game match recently, and Houdini won by a wide margin of 23.5-16.5. You can see the match here:
http://livechess.chessdom.com/site/ [chessdom.com] (Check for TCEC S1 Elite Match)
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Houdini is based on another open-source engine (Ippolit / RobboLito), which are based on reverse engineering Rybka, which is, well, see the original statement (the article is hopelessly biased and gets some facts wrong).
It's a mess.
This is very easy to verify (Score:2)
If the author still claims his software is original, he should release the source code to the panel under an NDA strictly for the purposes of evaluation.
NDA's dont' mean jack **** (Score:2)
Many people choose not to disclose their inventions and keep them a trade secret. This is done for a good reason. Disclosure, even under an NDA, doesn't guarantee it won't get disclosed to those you don't want to disclose it to.
In this case we have a panel of 34 programming chess players. Would you want anyone of that group to see your code if you want to keep it away from programming, chess-playing people?
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If the author still claims his software is original, he should release the source code to the panel under an NDA strictly for the purposes of evaluation.
Except that would open the members of the panel up to potential future claims that they plagiarized from Rybka. They should have an independent third-party, one that does not write chess engines, audit the three software programs under NDA and return an analysis of how likely it is that Rybka includes code from the other engines (a la SCO vs. IBM.)
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According to the article the panel is actually made up of his competitors, past and present. An NDA won't cut it (certainly wouldn't for me anyway). They should have at least given him a more impartial jury.
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The panel was made up of every computer chess expert the organization could get their hands on, which of course included competitors.
But if he wanted to avoid those, he could have proposed to send his source to a neural subselection.
He didn't reply at all. What could he say? The full reports are posted, and they're completely damning. I guess the writer of the article linked here didn't manage to understand that.
Rybka ... Or Skynet? (Score:4, Funny)
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Oddly enough, the word "Rybka" in Indo-Ukranian translates as "Net of the Sky."
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Proper Punishment (Score:2)
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"The correct course of action is erasure"
Always I want to be with you, and make believe with you, and live in harmo... oh, wait, wrong Erasure.
Should be easy to prove innocence (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't really hold up. Yes, Rajlich is trying to sell his software, so he can't open-source it to the world. But to exonerate himself he doesn't have to release the source-code to the world; he simply needs to arrange for the source code to be shown to the expert panel. As long as they can both confirm that: (1) the provided source compiles to the binary used in competition, and (2) there is no substantial overlap between the provided source and other known codebases, then he's in the clear. The expert panel doesn't have to retain copies of the source code beyond the review period (all copies could be destroyed).
So, really, it should be possible for Rajlich to demonstrate the originality of his code without releasing it or decreasing his commercial opportunities. The fact that he hasn't done this is strange. In that sense, it sounds to me like the ICGA made the right decision here.
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I have an honest question. I'm going to assume the program is compiled into an executable, and not a scripting language like python. How do they determine if code from an open source program was used from the binary program?
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From what I gathered from glancing at TFA, the panel was looking at algorithmic similarities, not necessarily code ones. In those cases, there is no need to have the source, since the algorithms will naturally be visible through the program's execution.
From this point on, Rajlich will need to prove that he did not in fact copy Fruit or Crafty, though this may be hard to do so if the above is to be trusted (ie he could've made his own code but used the exact same behaviors by simply looking at how Fruit work
Re:Should be easy to prove innocence (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with looking at just algorithm similarities is that every modern chess bot uses some variant of the same algorithm so the executable code will superficially look similar (negamax.) Computers aren't powerful enough to search the entire game tree, so you have to stop after a certain number of levels (15, for instance) and use a heuristic to evaluate the strength of that position.
The main differences between chess bots are found in that heuristic.
According to the actual report [chessvibes.com] the heuristic is obviously based on Fruit's, which is what they're really angry about.
Re:Should be easy to prove innocence (Score:5, Informative)
I have an honest question. I'm going to assume the program is compiled into an executable, and not a scripting language like python. How do they determine if code from an open source program was used from the binary program?
Compile it with debugging symbols and compare to the open source program compiled with debugging symbols and compare the symbol tables. How odd that so many functions are exactly the same length and have exactly the same arguments. Run both thru a profiler and notice any identical control flow loops. I suspect there's a way to ask the GCC optimizer to compare the psuedocode before it gets assembled. Heck, just rub the raw binaries against each other and look for matches. It would be hilarious to ask/force him to compile and/or link mixmaster style
Ask a "windows security researcher" dude how he identifies a file with a virus. If he says, "use norton" then fire him and repeat. Eventually you'll find someone who knows how to use the binary equivalent of "substr".
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How do they determine if code from an open source program was used from the binary program?
This would be determined by isolating a version of the executable used in competition and then asking the developers to run through a procedure using only the source code to create an exact duplicate of the competition binary. Comparing that the 1's and 0's in two different executables are identical is fairly trivial.
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spot copied code, and it shouldn't matter if he's copied algorithms.
Isn't copied algorithms the stereotypical way to catch programming school plagiarizers? Why look, one smart-ish guy, and his three moron drinking buddies, all had exactly the same picket fence error in exactly the same place... What a coincidence? This does not work on tiny toy programs, but something big enough to win at chess is probably big enough.
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But to exonerate himself he doesn't have to release the source-code to the world; he simply needs to arrange for the source code to be shown to the expert panel.
Alternately, they could deploy several classic crypto solutions, which means they're easy to half ass and screw up.
There's a couple good crypto algorithms to hash the unknown and known source code, compare the hashes, etc. No need to let anyone directly read the unknown source code.
To prove he's not handing you hashes of /dev/random you can compile the code, see if it matches his binary.
Besides simple hash comparisons, there are some digital cash algos oriented around detecting double spending... You could
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Yeah, but the expert panel in this case includes many of his competitors. It would be like Apple being forced to show MS their source code, with the promise that MS wouldn't steal it.
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The expert panel is comprised of his competition. They are the very people he wants to keep from seeing his code.
The only way this could be done is with an impartial third party audit... but who pays for it?
Not again! (Score:2)
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Don't you mean it's this Turk [wikipedia.org]?
Hmmm...no comparison of source codes (Score:2)
Since Rybka's source was not released, let alone compared, they sure seem sure of their conclusions.
Also, the article states that they "unfairly cheated" but, aside from not disclosing the alleged plagiarized work, why is that "unfair". Or is the use of the open source codes considered "unfair".
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The rules of the International Computer Games Association that hosts the championship state that the program must be an original work of the developers. If the program is derived from other sources, they must be named together with the original authors.
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If the panel hasn't seen the code, how do they know it was derived from anything else?
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Reverse engineering.
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Also, the article states that they "unfairly cheated" but, aside from not disclosing the alleged plagiarized work, why is that "unfair". Or is the use of the open source codes considered "unfair".
More interesting is how does one cheat fairly?
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What aside is there? It's fairly clear that his claiming the work of others as his own is the issue.
Here's a quote from the an open letter announcing the ban.
"Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in their submission details."
Open source is fine - so long as credit is given.
Crafty isn't open source software (Fruit 2.1 is) (Score:2)
Crafty is not open source software, though its license has similarities to an open source software license. Crafty is for "personal use only", which means that it fails the Open Source Definition [opensource.org] criteria "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor".
Crafty's main.c file says: "All rights reserved. No part of this program may be reproduced in any form or by any means, for other than your personal use, without the express written permission of the authors. This program may not be used in whole, nor in
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
I RTFA and have a question about Deep Blue (Score:2)
The article makes the bold claim that "IBM's Deep Blue cheated to beat Garry Kasparov" the link they give mentions merely that Kasparov made such an accusation, and that the accusation was repeated in a documentary. On what basis did he make such a claim?
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On the basis that he lost. Really. Kasparov thought Deep Blue was making moves that were too 'human-like,' and therefore it must have been fed moves from human players.
You see similar reactions from poker players. Humans don't want to believe that computers are capable of bluffing convincingly, but even simplistic alpha-beta poker bots are perfectly able to do it.
I dunno? Sensed a disturbance in the force? (Score:4, Informative)
This explains it, but without an exact source:
http://blog.chess.com/clizaw/did-ibm-cheat-kasparov [chess.com]
Yeah, that's just Kasparov being a sore loser (Score:3)
I read that article. What a joke.
His "evidence":
- He thought humans must have intervened in the middle of the game because the machine did something he didn't expect. But no actual evidence whatsoever was provided for this serious charge.
- He asked for the machine's logs, but IBM refused to provide them. If he wanted the logs, he should have made that part of the agreement beforehand. IBM probably withheld them at the time to preserve secrets on exactly how the machine worked, which could have given Kas
Whining, chess-playing, sore losers! (Score:2)
Maybe chess-playing people just don't like losing to computers. After all, the article mentioned by the OP states that:
As if it were a fact. Was this ever found to be the case? I thought it was only alleged by Kasparov and never proven.
Since the 34-person panel of chess-playing programmers never saw the source code to Rybka, yet still concluded that different versions were plagiarizer
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Humans haven't been able to compete against computers for quite a few years. Even a cheap netbook can plow through more levels of the game tree than Deep Blue could, and Deep Blue was even using custom hardware specifically designed for chess. It's not a simple case of a sore loser.
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Kasparov thought that people were helping Deep Blue during the game. That would be cheating.
I think Samuel Johnson said it best (Score:4, Funny)