Simply on the basis of telling a fascinating story, the series is well worth reading. Beyond that, some of what particularly struck me was that:<p>- since about 2005, chess programs that run on a regular PC have consistently outperformed the best human grandmasters, and the skill of the computer chess programs continues to improve. 2005 was a quantum shift in the chess programming world, when chess programs first played "brilliant games with deep, beautiful combinations...[and] routinely produce[d] highly artistic masterpieces of chess while avoiding a great many pointless “computer” moves that for many years had been a source of ridicule among strong human players."<p>- improvement in algorithms is driven by an active community ecosystem, open source contributions and flagrant copying of the brilliant insights of a few. No matter how brilliant the insight, the community is able to improve upon it. Intellectual property protection would have stopped much of this improvement in its tracks.<p>It's four separate articles, so I posted the first. All four are:<p><a href="http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7791" rel="nofollow">http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7791</a> (part 1)<p><a href="http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7807" rel="nofollow">http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7807</a> (part 2)<p><a href="http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7811" rel="nofollow">http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7811</a> (part 3)<p><a href="http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7813" rel="nofollow">http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7813</a> (part 4)
OT: why do websites find it useful to disable the up/down arrow keys? It is not. It's very annoying. Make navigation a pain in the butt. Make people never want to come back to your site.
Isn't there something slightly ironic about accusing the best pupil in the class of peeking over the shoulders of the other students during tests? Not that it can't be a correct accusation, but if this guy "cruised to victory in four consecutive WCCC tournaments in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010" then he must have done something right (other than copy-paste).<p>From a copyright perspective I can certainly see an issue, but that would be between Rajlich and the author of this Fruit I would say.
For what it's worth, the WCCC's Rule 2 seems to be a lot like a university honor code (if you do borrow code or ideas, make sure you cite it.) I don't believe that's too hard to follow. Maybe someone should fund a kaggle competition to design the best chess-playing program, with the final requirement of making the code open-source after :)<p>Given that most of what you'd implement a computer chess engine is pretty much available online (at most,behind a paywall), and digging through the source code of GNUChess and Crafty would give a lot of insight into the scoring function, so, yes, the score function would be pretty much similar in most parts unless someone comes up with a radically new way of doing things.
From the article, "By definition, plagiarism only happens when credit to sources is not given, which was never the case with Rybka."<p>I simply do not agree with this. I cannot copy slabs of open source code, incorporate them into my product and pass if off as my own just because I somewhere credited the great performance of my program to stuff I learned from reading open source software.<p>To me, plagiarism is copying some portion of someone else's work and including it in a work which I (explicitly or implicitly) claim to be my own.<p>For example, a student handing in a wikipedia article for a homework assignment still commits plagiarism even if they credit wikipedia as a <i>source</i> but don't explicitly say the thing is a wikipedia article. They hand it in as their work when they did not write it. So at this point I do not feel I agree with the article. It's as though the argument is, yes he copied, but it's ok because he gave "credit", there were plenty of new ideas and everyone else was doing it too. That's not the same thing as, "he didn't commit plagiarism". The latter means he did not copy the code.<p>Having said that, I am absolutely gobsmacked that the committee did not simply ask for the source code to both programs, check that it in fact compiles to the binaries in question, then do a comparison for legally significant quantities of identical code.<p>It's even more remarkable when you realise that the version of Fruit involved was open source, so they didn't even need to ask for the source code to that!<p>Note: I edited the above in response to the comments below.
Good article. I agree that to slam someone's reputation in public, the ICGA should have had much better evidence. My understanding is that the release of Fruit source code inspired many chess programmers.
For UK/Hungary computer nerds, Dr David Levy was also responsible for the Enterprise 64 computer:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_%28computer%29" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_%28computer%29</a>
Although the articles seem to not mention it, it should probably be noted the author is a moderator on the Rybka forums so is most likely not coming from an exactly unbiased viewpoint.
It has been discussed (in chess circles) in excruciating and unambiguous detail how Rajlich blatantly ripped off (Google it) open source code, thereby violating tournament rules, open source licenses, etc. This "debunking" series of articles by Chessbase is a pathetic attempt to reinvent the past on behalf of one of their most lucrative products, and perhaps to fool a wider audience who didn't follow the original scandal when it happened.<p>I used to be a big fan of Rybka, Rajlich and Chessbase, but these continued denials just make a bad thing worse. It's like Floyd Landis, Tyler Hamilton, and the third guy.