Hyatt Is Gone!

[hyatt]

There's an old quote, "if the evidence is against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the evidence." To which I will add, if BOTH are against you, attack the messengers instead.

[Uly]

Well, it seems like ChessBase has finally decided to "report" on the Rybka scandal. In the new article, they should have mentioned that a) Søren is a moderator on the Rybka Forum and b) ChessBase is a distributor of Rybka and in no way impartial.

Seems ironic considering the banning of Vas from the WBCCC was mainly decided by his competitors!

[Harvey Williamson]

Well, it seems like ChessBase has finally decided to "report" on the Rybka scandal. In the new article, they should have mentioned that a) Søren is a moderator on the Rybka Forum and b) ChessBase is a distributor of Rybka and in no way impartial.

Seems ironic considering the banning of Vas from the WBCCC was mainly decided by his competitors!

Chessbase claim to be the main site for Chess news. Reporting 1 part of the story in isolation makes them the Pravda of Chess news.

[Jeremy Bernstein]

Well, it seems like ChessBase has finally decided to "report" on the Rybka scandal. In the new article, they should have mentioned that a) Søren is a moderator on the Rybka Forum and b) ChessBase is a distributor of Rybka and in no way impartial.

Seems ironic considering the banning of Vas from the WBCCC was mainly decided by his competitors!

Uly, that's crap and you know it. The overwhelming majority of people on that panel were not Vas' competitors.

And. Tit for tat isn't a reasonable standard, or excuse, for anything.

[Uly]

Chessbase claim to be the main site for Chess news. Reporting 1 part of the story in isolation makes them the Pravda of Chess news.

Yet they're the first ones reporting this side, what does that say about the other chess news sites?

Uly, that's crap and you know it.

No, I don't.

The overwhelming majority of people on that panel were not Vas' competitors.

And the majority abstained from voting.

And. Tit for tat isn't a reasonable standard, or excuse, for anything.

I think Soren was the best for the job for a Chessbase article about it, that he's a Rybka Forum moderator is not related to that, you almost sounds like Harvey when he complained I was moderating both Rybka Forum and Hiarcs Forum at some point. So what? It didn't lose my impartiality and I did my best to moderate both places, just like Soren is doing his best on the CB article.

People already know CB is a Rybka distributor, and they didn't cover the WCCC, but I'd have done the same as the tourney had the relevancy of a basement tourney, with the 9th top engine winning it (and they also distribute Junior. And the WCCC had a "software only" section that they didn't report either, that Hiarcs won, and they distribute Hiarcs 13 too, so the "CB distributes Rybka" is a weak point.)

[BB+]

I think Soren was the best for the job for a Chessbase article about it,

As with most ex post facto commentators, Dr. Riis appears to assume that he has some great insight, in particular one that the Panel did not. And as with most such revisionists, I'd say he's simply wrong. I also question whether he has sufficient technical competence (his speciality is theoretical computer science, and I don't know if he has ever really programmed).
He states that: It is clear that Rybka is an original program by any reasonable standard. Based on the evidence I will present, a person can form a very credible alternative conclusion: that the implementation of similar evaluation concepts and algorithms in a computer chess program will inherently lead to code similarities even if no code is copied. But as of yet, I see little if any evidence for either of these claims. Perhaps Part 2 will eludicate?

He made two main points, segwayed into a long spiel about Rybka's impressiveness, and then switched into pedantic lawyer mode to ask exactly what the rules were, who can possibly interpret them, etc. Notably, on both of his main points, he is simply wrong. His grand attempt to re-position the issue as "Rybka implements concepts and algorithms learned from Fruit” appears to be the most correct and accurate formulation was already essentially considered (and rejected) in the ICGA process. Furthermore, as of yet, he has given no basis for this "correct and accurate formulation" (other than to give a general pointer to Mr. Schröder's website, and perhaps some unpublished notes of Mr. Schüle), whereas the contrary has voluminous material backing it. In particular, in my recent recapitulative PDF, on page 5, I state (as a synopsis of the R1/Fruit evidence, which is outlined in a later 14 pages):

The Panel concluded from EVAL_COMP, in part when viewed alongside other evidence, that it was quite clear that more than just "ideas" from Fruit 2.1 re-appeared in Rybka 1.0 Beta, but rather quite specific creative choices. Any individual element could be declared to be simply "Fruit influence", but the picture as a whole stretched much beyond that. There was a general consensus that the Fruit/Rybka situation was much beyond the "standard" amount of engine sharing that was typically permitted in author-based computer chess.

His second main contention, that all computer chess programs are much the same, seems only to be backed by a quotation claimed to be from Rajlich (where "95% algorithmically" is claimed). [Riis exaggerates his position so much as to state that one can start by acknowledging the truth contained within Rajlich’s remark on this topic, perhaps in the hope that no one will challenge it]. Again I can't imagine that most programmers would agree with it, at least in the manner used by Dr. Riis. For instance, Rajlich himself claimed that Rybka had a very original search and evaluation framework, hardly in line with the idea that chess programs are mostly all the same. Furthermore, the ICGA process particularly considered this angle, and took pains to measure how much "expected" overlap one might expect between programs. Again the consensus was much against the claim of Riis (or Rajlich), no matter much he hectors us to "acknowledg[e] the truth" of it.

[hyatt]

For the record, Ed has ALSO espoused this opinion. That for most parts of a chess engine, there is only ONE WAY (emphasis his) that those "parts" can be implemented. If you talk about the "simple" then that might be true, depending on your board representation there are two logical ways to determine if a pawn is passed, right? AND with a mask for bitboards, loop for a mail-box approach, correct? Maybe. Not in Cray Blitz, for example. We incrementally updated a lot of this stuff as we made moves, so that "ONE WAY" because "ONE OF MANY POSSIBLE WAYS" even for a very simple concept. But when you talk about a more traditional concept like "evaluate a backward/weak pawn" one is foolish to try to imply there is only ONE WAY to implement that. Most can't even agree on exactly what a weak or backward pawn is. See the common argument about an isolated d-pawn in various QP openings. Weak or strong? So this "95% is done the same by everyone" is a crock. In fact, from all the code I have looked at over the past year or two as this argument raged, I would claim exactly the OPPOSITE. That MAYBE 5% of the code MIGHT be very similar in two engines. And that is not a guarantee when you think about bitboard vs mailbox, just for starters. 95% is nonsense. There are a number of open-source engines anyone can look at and compare just the search code, for starters. It is remarkable how different people do things differently. Simple ideas like "what is the last full-width ply? Depth=1 or depth=0? Do you do extensions after making a move, before you call search, or at the top of search after it has been called after a move is made? Do you hash at the top of search, or inside the main make/search/unmake loop? There are so many different ways to do EXACTLY the same idea, but with WILDLY DIFFERENT SEMANTICS. And the RF folks simply don't get that. Even when I point out that I give some straight-forward programming assignments, such as a simple sort in X86 assembly language. And I do NOT get "identical code". If a class of 20+ finds 20+ different ways of writing that code that is implementating a really simple idea, how can one produce 95% similar code for something as complex as a chess program. The subject ALWAYS gets changed over there should I ask that question...