Source Authorship Forensics
A source-level read of tomitank/tomitankChess, contrasted with Stockfish — the clearest human case in the series.
tomitankChess has been developed by one named person since September 2017 — years before AI code generation existed in any usable form. Its 343 commits span nearly a decade of steady, single-author evolution from version 2.0 to 7.0. You cannot retro-generate a nine-year commit history; the timeline alone settles the question.
Everything else agrees: a distinctive human voice in the docs, a real author with a real-world identity, pure hand-written JavaScript, and not a trace of AI residue.
Confidence: Certain — the project predates the technology in question.
Authorship questions are usually inferred. Here one fact ends the discussion.
| # | Signal | What it shows | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | First commit 2017-09-17, 343 commits through 2026 | ~9 years of development — predates AI code generation entirely | Decisive |
| 2 | Single named author (Kuzmics Tamás), incl. a workplace email | A real person's long-term personal project | Decisive |
| 3 | Distinctive Hungarian-English README voice ("the first full BitBoard JavaScript chess engine on the World!") | Unmistakably a person, not generated prose | Strong |
| 4 | Steady versioned evolution 2.0 → 7.0; casual, typo-bearing commits | Organic long-term maintenance | Strong |
| 5 | Zero AI residue; no agent artifacts | No generated-code fingerprints | Support |
A very different animal from Stockfish — by design — yet built on the same fundamentals.
| Where it resembles Stockfish |
|---|
| Bitboard board representation and the classic engine pipeline |
| UCI protocol; runs in standard GUIs (Arena, Cutechess, WinBoard) |
| Alpha-beta search with the usual pruning/ordering heritage |
| Long-lived, versioned, single-lineage development |
| Where it differs |
|---|
| Pure JavaScript vs C++ — deliberately readable, ~5× slower than C |
| Runs in a web browser (WebWorker) as well as via Node |
| One author over nine years vs a global team over decades |
| No Emscripten transpile (contrast stockfish-js) — hand-written JS throughout |
tomitankChess is human-written, without qualification — a nine-year labour of love by a single named developer that began long before generative AI could write code. It is the anchor point of this series: whatever ambiguity newer repositories carry, this one has none. A person built it, by hand, in the open, over the better part of a decade.