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Subject: Re: some questions about chess programs and money

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 14:41:42 04/07/03

Go up one level in this thread


On April 07, 2003 at 16:53:51, Keith Evans wrote:

>On April 07, 2003 at 13:16:23, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On April 07, 2003 at 12:58:40, Frank Quisinsky wrote:
>>
>>>On April 07, 2003 at 09:56:54, Uri Blass wrote:
>>>
>>>>Suppose that a programmer of a good program decides to sell his(her) engine only
>>>>as a winboard engine(it can run under Fritz in these conditions)
>>>>
>>>>I am interested in your estimate for the following questions
>>>>
>>>>How much money (s)he can get from it in the following cases:
>>>>
>>>>1)The program is at similiar level to Crafty
>>>>2)The program is at similiar level to Ruffian
>>>>3)The program is at similiar level to Fritz8
>>>>4)The program is 100 elo better than Fritz8
>>>>
>>>>I thought that the programmers of the top amateur(crafty level that are not
>>>>clones of other programs) are probably rich people thanks to the fact that they
>>>>are good programmers so they do not care if they can make more 100$ per month
>>>>from their program but it seems that I was wrong based on the following post
>>>>when the author of smarthink claims that he earns only 100$ per month:
>>>>
>>>>http://f11.parsimony.net/forum16635/messages/46347.htm
>>>>
>>>>Another possibility is that I am wrong in my guess that he can make money by
>>>>selling his program.
>>>>
>>>>More questions:
>>>>
>>>>suppose for the discussion that a programmer decides to earn 10$ per copy that
>>>>(s)he sells.
>>>>Suppose that the programmer expects to sell 120 copies per year.
>>>>
>>>>What should be the price of the program?
>>>>
>>>>Is the price significantly higher relative to the case that he expects to sell
>>>>1200 or 12000 copies per year?
>>>>
>>>>Uri
>>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>the price make the programmer.
>>>And if we have an engine with 2000 ELO for 49 US Dollar is this OK for me.
>>>
>>>But the most amateur chess programmers have fun on this hobby and don't think
>>>about money.
>>
>>There is no contradiction between fun and money.
>>The fact that you have fun does not mean that you need to have objection to
>>making money.
>>
>
>Would you continue to work on your program if you determined that there is no
>money to be made from it?
>
>I think that some people here have the impression that you would not, which
>might be an erroneous impression.

I do not know.
In that case I may also consider to leave chess programming and start a go chess
program.
The problem is that I do not know go so chess programming is more interesting
for me.

I also do not see a situation in the near future when I can be sure that there
is no money.

I can also say that I do not write a lot of code but mainly looking at games
of the program and think how to evaluate things.

The way of vincent who has a big evaluation seems to me to hurry to write things
and more things and I prefer to try to get ideas how to write productive things
without a lot of code.

I thought mainly about the evaluation of pawn structure and pawns relative to
the king in the last weeks and I did nothing about the search but I guess that
after I will be satisfied with that evaluation then I am going to improve my
search again.

There are a lot of ideas that I never tried because thinking more than
implementing things is my hobby.

This is also the reason that I learned mathematics and not computers at
university.

Uri



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