Re: Plagiary problem

[Mousheng Xu <xu@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:28 AM 4/26/99 +0800, Chen Zhixing wrote:
>
>I.e., the participated programs submitted to the organizer can be copied by
>any other participant if he requests it.  So that he can readily obtain
>evidences of plagiarism if any.

Dear Professor Chen,

	Plagiarism is a nasty problem. I cannot think out a solution for it. But
it seems to me that "Participated programs should be allowed to exchange
with each other" might be a big flaw -- I could obtain a copy of  your
program & hack it. I don't know which level you meant for exchange, binary
program or source code? :) If it's source code, I'd welcome your proposal
-- I would send a junk program to participate, then I could obtain the work
of all the hard working programmers.
	Last night, while I was chatting with my wife about sending my
ever-to-be-finished go program to a competition, she worried so much about
somebody "stealing" my program. I laughed at it because I didn't expect
much for this first version. "But people could steal your idea ...". Well,
whatever, if you are programming go, you hope you have something better
than the others. 
	A quick response might be "don't take part in any competition". But if
reverse engineering exists, your commercial product could be reverse
engineered, and there is nothing you could do about it unless you don't
want to let any other people to use your program.
	Plagiarism is a serious crime.

-- Mousheng