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Re: Sharing Secrets (was: [computer-go] Computer Go hardware)

All this "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" is like kindergarten.
Not really.
I was specifically targeting (look at the title of my post) "competitors", meaning people who make many tens of thousands of USD per year with their Go software, like David Fotland and Michael Reiss do.

I do not think that those guys regard their trade secrets and intellectual property as "kindergarten stuff". I have heard that Mick Reiss has lived off his Go software for the better part of a decade. Meaning perhaps one million USD income, considering the fact that he holds a dual PHD and still prefers to do his own stuff.


If you want to share, do it without expecting any immediate payback,
otherwise you're already in a different ballgame from that which gave
you gnugo, linux, or the web in the first place.
Everyone is free to publish stuff for free when they do not depend on the income of their work. Some of us have invested a lot of time-money (tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of USD) to build a company that makes Go software.
You can't compare the two.

And, about GNU Go, I have no intentions to ever look at their sources. I simply don't think they are useful to me.

I respect the Open Source community but I see a lack of respect from the OS community to the professional Go researchers (that still occasionally publish stuff or give very strong hints like I just did).


Antti Huima's trick of building mirroring, rotation, and color reversal
symmetries directly into a segmented Z-hash is neat, but his proposal is
flawed in that (as Antoine de Maricourt has shown) one can systematically
construct pairs of plausible Go positions that collide under Huima's scheme.
Fortunately there are alternative implementations that do not suffer this
defect, with as few as 6 (compared to Huima's 8) hash segments.
I agree that it's flawed. I use the method of keeping 16 hashes up-to-date, take the smallest hash and use that the the invariant hash. I thought that was Kindergarten stuff :)


I have begun to write a paper on all this with Antoine but got bogged
down for too little time and too much perfectionism (wishing to be
mathematically precise about how such defects arise, how to prove that a
particular scheme is free of them, etc).
Yes..
I don't have a talent for mathematics unfortunately, I tried but it's hopeless.
So no papers soon from me. I can't prove anything except "common sense" stuff.


Now show me yours :-)
First show me real earth-shattering proprietary intellectual property patentable trade secrets, not Kindergarten stuff :)
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