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Subject: Re: Lets all buy Weak Engines

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 12:29:02 04/02/04

Go up one level in this thread


On April 02, 2004 at 15:04:15, martin fierz wrote:

>On April 02, 2004 at 12:36:58, Jorge Pichard wrote:
>
>>On April 02, 2004 at 12:09:29, Eduard Nemeth wrote:
>>
>>>On April 02, 2004 at 11:46:56, Christian Koch wrote:
>>>
>>>>see http://rahman85.tripod.com/rahman.html
>>>
>>>All engines goes commercial !
>>>
>>>I hold me then only the best 5 (MAX)!
>>>Is this the way?
>>>
>>>Eduard
>>
>>All the engines can go commercial, but most people will only buy the top 5 rated
>>by the SSDF and other Rating agencies.
>>
>>Jorge
>
>"let's all buy weak engines" - ahem, do you mean to imply that ktulu is weak??
>ktulu is a very good free engine, and if version 5 gets something like 50-100
>points better it is certainly a reasonable move to make it commercial...

I play as much against the weakling engines like Golem as against Crafty.  I
think I probably enjoy them both the same.  Crafty for the nice chess lesson,
and Golem for allowing me to take out my frustrations.
;-)

If you look at the "Young Talents" CD, many of those engines are not as strong
as the strongest freeware engines.  Stobor is sold commercially (under some
other names), and it was middle of the pack in the WMCCC contests that it
entered.  There are several other instances like that.

There are some shareware chess engines in the ballpark of Golem for strength (do
a web search and you will find them).  I think that they won't make any money,
but that is neither here nor there.  If the authors want to sell them, I have no
problem with it.

In an open market place, we vote with our pocket books about what is
interesting.  I have bought many of the new commercial engines mostly because I
want to support the efforts of the authors.  I already have more strong chess
engines than I reasonably know what to do with them.

The danger of going commercial is that the hobby becomes a job.  And if
something goes wrong you _have_ to fix it, whether you feel like it or not.  If
you want to make money programming, you should be able to make at least
$100/hour if you have decent ability.  You will never make that chess
programming, unless some miracle happens like a huge company jumping on the
bandwagon (e.g. some video game company or Sears or something).  Probably Johan
de Koning has made a lot of money (at least he _ought_ to have, judging by
quoted sales figures).  I am guessing that none of the other chess programmers
has made near as much money doing chess programming than they would have
received doing business programming.



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