On Saturday, August 8, 2015 at 3:21:06 PM UTC-4, Andy Blackburn wrote:
In the spirit of out of the box thinking...

A radically simpler and non-technical arms race approach to this is simply to apply a "leech tax".

That's the spirit, 9B! But that problem isn't using a thermal that another pilot found. If I spot someone a few miles away banked up at 60 degrees going up like smoke over Hillary Clinton's email servers, I shouldn't be penalized if I abandon 1 kt. at 1,200 feet and run for it.

On the other hand, if the well-known post-start-gate "towing" pattern is detected where the trailing pilot enters thermal a few wingspans directly behind the leader, levy the tax. Since this is all automated, set a threshold value between two gliders, say 1 to 2 minutes, after which it's assumed the second pilot did enough decision making that it's not leeching. And since this is all automated, if the software detects that the trailing pilot closed the gap during the previous run by a more skillful/lucky path, no penalty.