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Subject: Re: More about the Gothic Vortex Program, $10,000 challenge

Author: Ed Trice

Date: 18:33:33 01/05/04

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Hello Vincent,

I will try to address each of your points here the best that I can.

>
>  a) it is a bad idea to go play different forms of chess. the reason
>     is trivial. a game can only get great when everybody is using the
>     same rules

People sometimes forget that chess was not always the "packaged game" that it is
today. It has undergone countless forms of evolution of the centuries. If what
you are saying is 100% accurate, you would have to conceed that you believe a
game such as chaturanga (Hindu for the four branches of the Indian army) should
still be played, since it was perhaps the "original" form of chess, and as you
have stated, it is a bad idea to play other forms (including the highly evolved
form of chaturanga, which we now call chess).

>  b) for a price you *possibly* win of
>     $10k i don't even *start programming* a new game.

And you are welcome to watch someone else win this money.

>  c) your engine will be beated of course hands down by any commercial
>     programmer, but those commercial programmers know very well
>     that the strength of chess is that a couple of hundreds of millions
>     play that game. Just like why FRC will get nothing, the gothic chess
>     will get nothing too.

Well, my chess program, The Sniper, was given a two page article in the December
1990 issue (or was it 1989?). Back in those days, my program ran on a machine
with half a Meg of RAM, that is, 512 K. There was no hard drive. Both the
Operating System and the program resided on an 800K diskette, which was required
to boot my 16 MHz Macintosh SE.

This program eclipsed a 2200 rating in 1988 in its debut performance. It did not
lose a game until facing Mark Eidenmiller (2398) over a year later. In fact, the
only 2 games The Sniper lost were to 2300+ players.

In The Sniper's final tournament appearance, I sat next to Dr. Hans Berliner and
HiTech.  HiTech won the Pennsylvania State Championship that year 5-0, but The
Sniper did not lose any games in the Open Section either. This did not go
unnoticed by Dr. Berliner.

So, please, do not talk to me about producing high-performance software. I did
it when hardware performance was so low, people still ask me today  what made
The Sniper tick.

> However additionally:
>  d) gothic chess is your copyright/patent. That means that everyone will
>     be paying royalties forever to you for the single user license they
>     will sell each 100 years. So no commercial guy will ever start of course
>     promoting your game and no freeware guy should either.

Patent law protects Gothic Chess until the year 2019.

I am not sure the rest of  your statement makes sense.

>  e) basically gothic chess is bad taste because you stole the chess rules
>     and created your own game out of it by making board a bit larger and
>     adding 2 pieces and a pawn. I know another zillion ways to do that.
>     Just create an indian queen (can do just 2 steps like the queen) and you
>     have decachess (if that's not already a copyright someone else).
>     Creating that would be still ok, but you claim it your own patent.
>     Very bad taste IMHO.

80 square variants of chess date back to Pietro Carrera (1617), Henry Bird
(1874) and Jose Capablanca (1925). Nothing was "stolen".

It is an innovation. You might want to read...

http://www.GothicChess.org/improvements.html

...and....

http://www.GothicChess.org/long_answer.html

...for some more insight. There are some things in Gothic Chess that have no
counterparts that are very cool. One of these I call the Chancellor's Vortex.

http://www.GothicChess.org/vortex.html


>  f) Because you are the only one earning on gothic chess, people even
>     must ask a *license* from you to setup a league of gothic chess or
>     whatever or make software for it, i consider all posts done on this
>     subject here commercial posts. So please post all this nonsense
>     in some forum that is not called Computer Chess.

I believe there were an infinite number of ways you could have stated this much
less harshly.

>  g) You have still a lot to learn about games in general seeing your
>     material value discussion at your homepage.

I believe you are talking about this link...

http://www.GothicChess.org/piece_values.html

Please be so kind as to tell me where my errors are, mathematical or otherise. I
welcome your detailed analysis.



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