Author: Adam Oellermann
Date: 14:06:49 06/19/01
Go up one level in this thread
On June 18, 2001 at 06:38:07, Uri Blass wrote: >On June 18, 2001 at 06:23:52, Adam Oellermann wrote: > >>On June 18, 2001 at 06:13:27, Jouni Uski wrote: >> >>>... any chess engine surpasses DeepFritz / ChessTiger 14 rating by 50 points? >>>1, 2, 5, 10 years? Any quesses? Then I will again consider to buy new engines! >>>E.g. Junior7 and Shredder5.32 will NOT be any stronger than above-mentioned >>>programs - no reason to buy. >>> >>>Jouni >> >>It seems to me that there are other reasons to buy a chess engine than raw ELO >>score. Certainly, even Gnuchess is more than strong enough to defeat me handily >>on my PIII (I guess I might manage 1700 at best); any number of the free >>Winboard engines would do. However, I do not use an engine merely for its raw >>strength. Some of *my* criteria include playing style, functionality/options, >>user interface, coaching, databases etc... I can easily see myself buying an >>upgrade to a chess prog with the *exact* *same* engine, just upgraded features, >>because they make playing and learning easier or more interesting. >> >>I must say, if I were a commercial chess program vendor, I would certainly work >>on playing strength, but my primary focus would be functionality/features. >>Surely, given the incredible strength of modern chess engines on modern >>hardware, the marketplace of users requiring *even stronger* engines is really >>only the GMs. > >You are clearly wrong here. > >The market includes also correspondence players that want to buy a stronger >machine in order to beat their opponents. >The market includes also other people who play comp-comp games. >The market includes cheaters in ICC who want to inflate their rating. > >I guess that most of the buyers who buy a new engine only because of strength >are not GM's and even not IM's. > >Uri I am not clearly wrong. My criteria may differ from correspondence players, comp-comp gurus and cheaters. However, thousands of people around the world use a chess system to improve their chess. This means that their criteria may be more similar to mine than to correspondence players, cheats etc. I was quite clear that these were *my* criteria; I will go as far as to suggest that they are shared by a large slice of the computer chess market (possibly even the majority). I think you'll find that comp-comp experts are a vanishingly small percentage of commercial chess vendor's market. I *hope* you'll also find this is true of cheats :) It is also probably true of tournament players. So, for the majority of chess software purchasers, anything in the SSDF top 20 would certainly be adequate. They pay the premium prices for functionality, ease of use, knowledge resources (coaching, annotated games) etc. Witness the enormous success of Chessmaster over the years, in spite of not topping the SSDF list etc. I believe the reason these people continue to refine and develop their software with such urgency is that the sheeple want to know that they're buying the *best*. Even Chessmaster makes the rather dubious claim of being "the strongest engine money can buy"; it's right there on the box. However, CM's major advances in the last n releases have been user interface & feature enhancements. So perhaps I am wrong for a *minority* of cases. This doesn't make me clearly wrong :) Regards Adam
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