Is comparing the output of two different systems “reverse engineering”? Is modifying your output to be in par with a competitor reverse engineering? My point

Is comparing the output of two different systems “reverse engineering”? Is modifying your output to be in par with a competitor reverse engineering? My point is that the competition doesn’t know if SAS uses banana peels to generate their output- we only know that the the results are the same- and I don’t think that is a reasonable definition of reverse engineering. The algorithm has not been copied- only the resulting output. Trade secrets remain protected.