The "whistleblower"'s admission that he "did not have evidence to support his suspicion of fraud" is pretty damning. He fails to meet a much, much lower bar than direct observation -- he admitted he had no evidence at all to even support his suspicion of fraud.
> the most damning evidence you could possibly have is that you cannot reproduce the results
Seems like the "whistleblower" didn't even have that. From the paper by the AlphaChip authors: "We provided the committee with one-line scripts that generated significantly better RL results than those reported in Markov et al., outperforming their “stronger” simulated annealing baseline. We still do not know how Markov and his collaborators produced the numbers in their paper."
> the most damning evidence you could possibly have is that you cannot reproduce the results
Seems like the "whistleblower" didn't even have that. From the paper by the AlphaChip authors: "We provided the committee with one-line scripts that generated significantly better RL results than those reported in Markov et al., outperforming their “stronger” simulated annealing baseline. We still do not know how Markov and his collaborators produced the numbers in their paper."