Wednesday 29 June 2011

ICGA lowers the boom on Rybka

Earlier in the year I reported on the growing controversy about early version of Rybka being a clone of the Open Source chess program Fruit. At the time the International Computer Games Association were planning to investigate the claims. The investigation is now finished and the verdict is now in.
Basically they have found that Vasik Rajlich (the author of Rybka) based his early versions of Rybka on Fruit and Crafty (both open source) and failed to declare that Rybka was based upon these programs when entering ICGA events. As a result Rybka has been stripped of the World Computer Championship titles it won in 2007,08,09 and 10. Vasik Rajlich has also been banned from entering any ICGA events for life.
There is also the issue of whether Rybka breaches the Gnu Public Licence that was attached to Fruit. This case may be taken up by the Free Software Foundation, and may either see Rybka entirely withdrawn from the market, or that Rybka be subject to the GPL (ie source code being made public).
Chessvibes has extensive coverage of the ICGA findings, including links to the relevant documents concerning the case.

1 comment:

Paul said...

If true this is not good news...All this cheating can only hurt Chess !