Author: John Merlino
Date: 10:59:00 04/05/01
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On April 05, 2001 at 02:08:17, Kurt Utzinger wrote: >On April 04, 2001 at 22:23:32, John Merlino wrote: > >>I'm not offended by your post, and I hope you're not offended by my reply. The >>King's settings are believed to be the best for all time controls and all >>hardware configurations (as I mentioned in detail in the post that is a few >>"above" this one). We have to think of our typical user, and design the product >>for that person, rather than the computer chess enthusiast (which is a VERY >>SMALL portion of the people who buy Chessmaster) who wants the strongest >>possible engine out of the box. >>jm > >In my opinion your policy is wrong. You should indeed design your product for >the computer chess enthusiast and not for the typical user. You may be sure that >the latter will not complain because he is simply unable to win a single game >against Chessmaster. The typical user likes all the features of Chessmaster but >will not concern about the strongest possible engine .... Take other examples >like Fritz, ChessTiger and so on: all these programs satisfy both: the typical >user and the chess computer enthusiast. >Kurt Unfortunately, the "strongest possible engine" for the computer chess enthusiast would be designed for tournament time controls, as that is generally believed to be the ultimate test. But this would mean that it would have a 32MB hash table. However, if that was the default, the result would be a disaster on our minimum spec machine of a PII-233 with only 48MB of RAM (although, IMO, that RAM minimum is rather unrealistic). This is why there is a 1MB hash table by default. This will satisfy all but the enthusiast, who can easily change this setting if he/she wishes. And, once again, this is the ONLY setting that is certain to improve play with longer time controls. Modifying any other personality attributes has not been shown to clearly improve play (once again, say it with me :-) FOR ALL TIME CONTROLS. The computer chess enthusiast knows how to (and, actually, LOOKS FORWARD TO) tweaking settings and playing around to see if he/she can find settings that are stronger than the default. This is why these threads keep popping up every year, leading to dozens and dozens of different people's "strongest" settings suggestions. jm
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