HIARCS Chess Forums

[Harvey Williamson]

Open letter to the ICGA about the Rybka-Fruit issue

Dear David Levy, Jaap van den Herik and the ICGA Board,

Recently the author of Fruit, Fabien Letouzey, wrote an open letter to the computer chess community where he raised the concern that Rybka 1.0 beta may be a derivative of Fruit 2.1 in this public post: http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37762

Since then it has emerged from highly respected sources like Zach Wegner, Bob Hyatt and others that there is a lot of evidence that has been accumulated over the last few years that Rybka 1.0 beta is a derivative of Fruit 2.1.

Zach Wegner has presented evidence of alleged significant copied/derived Fruit evaluations in Rybka 1.0 beta here: https://webspace.utexas.edu/zzw57/rtc/eval/eval.html

A collection of evidence of the many cases of alleged copied/derived Fruit structure, code & data appearing in Rybka 1.0 beta has been put together in this PDF by Mark Watkins: http://www.open-chess.org/download/file.php?id=304

It is also worth considering that prior to Rybka 1.0 beta, previous Rybka versions were many hundreds of Elo points weaker than the Rybka 1.0 beta version that suddenly emerged in public in December 2005, just a few months after the open source public release of Fruit 2.1 under the GPL license. That same month Rybka beta entered and won the International Paderborn Computer Chess tournament.

The evidence alleges that by using and deriving code, data and structure from Fruit 2.1, Vasik Rajlich was able to make dramatic and huge progress with "his" program Rybka to the detriment of his fellow competitors. In our view this has made competitions involving Rybka grossly unfair.

As chess programmers we find this overwhelming evidence compelling. We believe Rybka is a Fruit derivative albeit an advanced one.

It is very likely that later Rybka versions have derived and benefited from Rybka 1.0 beta and hence in the circumstances our view is they should also be considered derivatives of Fruit 2.1 until proven otherwise.

We wish to make an official complaint to the ICGA that Rybka is a Fruit 2.1 derivative. Furthermore we believe it is a breach of the GPL license under which Fruit 2.1 was released.

We believe as an unauthorized Fruit derivative Rybka's entry into ICGA events has been contrary to the ICGA rules and the rules of fair play.

We ask the ICGA to carefully review the evidence, assess its validity, and act accordingly.

We note that the ICGA is intending on setting up a tribunal to assess such allegations and we believe this evidence should be strongly considered in that process.

In addition, we think the ICGA should in future insist that all authors of entries to ICGA events must submit to the ICGA the same executable(s), that is taking part in the ICGA event, where they can be stored for future analysis of potential derivative claims should they arise. Each author should also make a full and clear statement as to the originality of the entry, its contributors and any acknowledgements. Should justified suspicions exist authors must be willing to submit source code on a private and confidential basis to a select group of impartial programmers to privately determine source code origin.

Co-signed by the following chess programmers,
Fabien Letouzey
Zach Wegner
Mark Uniacke
Stefan Meyer-Kahlen
Ed Schröder
Don Dailey
Christophe Theron
Richard Pijl
Amir Ban
Anthony Cozzie
Tord Romstad
Ralf Schäfer
Gerd Isenberg
Johannes Zwanzger
Shay Bushinsky
Volker Böhm
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www.Hiarcs.com

[Kaj Soderberg]

Hi there,

I hope this will to a large extent solve the matter for the future one can oversee.

It will not repair the damage, as i personally see it anyway.
Hard working, maybe greatly reliant on income of chess programming, authors were put out of business by someone who came falling from the sky. Maybe an excellent programmer, but borrowing thousands of hours of work instead of finding things out himself, earning the first grey pieces of hair.
This until judged otherwise, of course.

The intentions are spot on. Hopefully we will get back to common decency in general and a more fair market.

People operating on the dark side cannot be avoided, but there can be hurdles to be taken and sanctions as a sword in the air to make some or many think twice.

I wish the real authors the best on this matter.
And last but not least, for those who quit, get on with making engines.
It is not all about the best, but about the variety of style of play.
Chess is fun.

Hats off,
Kaj

[RadioSmall]

It is quite clear that no one out of the Blue can come and write a 3000+ elo chess program.Why did it take so long to figure this out , and why the complaint to ICGA now ?? This should have been done 2 years ago. The "thing " is not even a complete chess program because it not underpromote to a bishop. Remove this disgrace from rating lists , gross violations of the GPL should be addressed in court. It would be nice also if the commercial programmers somehow got compensated for the money they would have otherwise made.

[Steve B]

[mackgra]

[Harvey Williamson]

today the biggest German news site spiegel.de has published an article about cloning.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/gadgets/0,1518,748616,00.html

It works quite well if you use google translate.
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www.Hiarcs.com

[Jeroen]

This is my reply in the Chess Vibes article:

I had a good laugh about this letter, which reads between the lines: ‘Rybka is too good, please ICGA, do something about it’. This is the comment I made on the Rybka forum, to place it in a historical context:
‘Picking ideas from other programs was already normal in the 1990′s. I have heard some of the top programmers by then speaking about this many times. Probably I shouldn’t have heard these conversations, but they were also not too eager to hide them. Decompiling and looking for ideas was just as normal in 1998 as it is right now. Claiming otherwise is just pathetic.

Please also note that Shredder, Fritz, Hiarcs and Junior were not greatly improving (20, maybe 30 elo a year) until Fruit came out. And they were even improving faster after Strelka. Don’t forget Zappa either, which was not very strong and after Fruit came out suddenly became very strong and won the world title.

As far as I am concerned, most of these programmers are sour losers and now they see their businesses implode, they try to do something about it.’

I am 100% sure most of the programs mentioned have made ‘huge and dramatic’ progress thanks to Rybka and Rybka derivatives, as well as thanks to Fruit. The whole thing looks very hypocrite to me, but in this crappy chess computer world it doesn’t surprise me at all.

[Jeroen]

Some more:

‘As a matter of fact, I have been in this computer chess world for some time and I can tell you that it was perfectly normal for the top guys to decompile the programs of their competitor (‘to look for ideas’) more than 10 years ago. I have overheard conversations by the top programmers by then, even bragging about it that ‘they had found some interesting stuff in program X or Y’. They were not even interested in this being a secret. One of the most funny remarks was a programmer, who had decompiled Chess Tiger and proudly told during a Leiden tournament that ‘Chess Tiger was showing around 1000-1500 kn/s on the GUI, while in fact it was searching much faster, around 4000 kn/s.’ The same Chess Tiger author who later was mad about Rybka not showing the right node count. Another nice one was a program author, who was working together with Cozzie at the time and who claimed that ‘Zappa is much like Fruit, but with better king safety’.

I would say: let the programmer who has never been guilty of looking into and taking idea’s from another program throw the first stone.

[Harvey Williamson]

I think the report/letter is not about using ideas, which is fine, but about copying them literally. The investigative process hopefully will show which of the 2 has occured.
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www.Hiarcs.com

[Jeroen]

'Each author should also make a full and clear statement as to the originality of the entry, [b]its contributors and any acknowledgements.'[/b]

OK, I am waiting for a list of ALL contributors regarding these programs mentioned in the letter to the ICGA.

I think the report/letter is not about using ideas, which is fine, but about copying them literally.

OK, then let's investigate ALL programs, trying to discover why they made modest elo gains before Fruit and made huge gains after Fruit, Strelka and the Rybka derivatives came out.

We all know that most of the 'protesting' programs would NEVER have made the huge progress of the last years when there wasn't free, STOLEN software available. Right?

[Harvey Williamson]

[Mark Uniacke]

[tomgdrums]

[RadioSmall]

[luckytrebor]