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BGonline.org Forums
Is XG violating GNUBG GPL?
Posted By: Timothy Chow In Response To: Is XG violating GNUBG GPL? (benf)
Date: Sunday, 19 March 2017, at 6:39 p.m.
benf wrote:
Can somebody post the cliff notes?
There are certain positions where the equities of, or equity differences between, various moves is zero or extremely close to zero. In such cases, a bot may make a seemingly "random" move, or a bizarre move. For example, in a gin race, it doesn't matter what move you make, and in a nearly gin race, it matters very little what move you make. You might or might not choose to resign, and your resignation might or might not be technically correct (depending on whether the position is truly gin or not).
If two different bots consistently make exactly the same "random" moves in such cases, then this could be considered evidence of code reuse. I have heard that a similar principle is sometimes used by publishers of dictionaries or other copyrighted texts, who may deliberately introduce typos so that if someone blindly copies the text, the low probability of having exactly the same typos will be strong evidence of plagiarism.
This argument is not quite as absurd as some of Murat's other arguments. However, all he has done is to collect some examples of such "random coincidences," without any effort to systematically calculate the probabilities. So his list of coincidences is useless as actual evidence. One needs to define clearly a statistical experiment in advance and then systematically generate data, collecting all instances of agreements and disagreements between the two bots, in order to arrive at some kind of statistically significant result.
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