How can a filched program play better Go than the program from which it is filched?
... and I don't recall anyone satisfactorily answering that.
If a plagiarist just repackages stolen code, s/he is competing against programs s/he can't possibly defeat, but at best only tie ... and in the six months or longer since the theft, the programmer from whom s/he stole the code will certainly have improved his/her code sufficiently to defeat the stolen stale version.
If a plagiarist steals effective code and changes it sufficiently so that it's a consistent winner in the next competitions -- well, then, shame on him/her for the initial theft, but it's no longer the stolen Fiat ... s/he's enhanced it by his/her own creativity to a supercharged new BMW, essentially a product which would have to be viewed as achieving its new victories by original work.
Maybe not a lot of new, novel, original, creative work ... but the museums are filled with lots of things that were almost telephones or almost airplanes. We call each other on the one Bell finally improved on, and fly around the world on the one the Wright Brothers invented.
If there is a reply to this, I hope it won't begin with "It's not as simple as that." But if it does, I hope the complicated replies are, at least, logical and rigorous. I'd be happy (well, maybe not happy, but content and pleased) for anyone who can rigorously illuminate the fatal flaws in this guy's argument.
>It seems to me that part of the thing about coding go has less to do
w/ becoming millionaires and >that it is an interesting problem.. (I'm
guessing that a generic chess proggie makes more money than
>your typical go program).
> -avi
In the global picture, there may be more money for chess proggies than for Go proggies, but one well-known Go programmer reports that there's lots of abundant corporate money available for good Go programs in Asia, and his seven personal computers (probably more by now) are living proof. So whatever the truth about this controversy, there is quite a bit at stake in hard cash.
Bob Merkin
http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/