Almond

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Almond,
a Clone of Mark Lefler's program Now, by fake author "Richard Hall" [1], an alleged student from University of Michigan, who asked the CSVN via Jan Krabbenbos and Hans Secelle to play the ICT 2010. "Richard Hall" further sent another version (?) of Almond to Jim Ablett which appeared to be a clone of an early version of the Myrddin engine by John Merlino, as confirmed by John, giving some details about the culprit [2]. The cloner made only the tiniest attempt to modify the source, even keeping all of internal comments, such as thanking the Chessmaster development team! The "successor" of Almond, Scaramanga, played the DOCCC 2010, also operated by Hans Secelle who regularly contacted "Richard Hall" [3]. Harvey Williamson raised suspicions after Scaramanga was connected from an Indian server at Playchess, and Hans Secelle sent the source code applied to Don Dailey forwarded for confirmation to Mark Lefler. Mark admitted he had naively shared his source code with someone who said he was named "Chinmay" who offered to run Now in a tournament with faster hardware and better compiler, and said he had operated Rybka at ACCA 2008 [4].

See also

External Links

References

  1. Bedrog (Fraud) CSVN site (Dutch)
  2. Re: A fool confesses to being foolish by John Merlino, CCC, Engine Origins, February 07, 2011 (requires registration)
  3. Hans Secelle (2011). Scaramanga: het verhaal van een ontmaskering of 'Het pad van een operator is met doornen geplaveid'. Computerschaak, No. 1, Feb 2011
  4. Scaramanga is a Clone by Harvey Williamson, Hiarcs Forum, December 31, 2010

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