Author: Sune Fischer
Date: 12:28:19 04/06/04
Go up one level in this thread
On April 06, 2004 at 14:32:46, Dann Corbit wrote: >On April 06, 2004 at 13:55:38, Sune Fischer wrote: >[snip] >>Sure I agree to all of that, but I'm still unsure of your point. >>Are you saying that winboard engines require this level of knowledge? >>If so that isn't true. > >Editing Winboard.ini to add an engine will never be successful in a commercial >venture. People will not like it. Like it? I doubt they like paying $50 either. :-) >>Editing one line in the winboard ini-file is not rocket science, not even for >>techno-phobes I think. > >My mother and father both have college degrees with excellent GPA (my father was >president of his Phi-Beta-Cappa section and got a master's degree in under 4 >years). I am pretty sure I would have to install a Winboard engine for them if >they wanted to play chess with it. > >Eventually, they could definitely figure it out for themselves. But on the >first small speedbump they would probably just decide is isn't worth it because >they are not terribly interested to start with. Both of them can play chess and >my father was very good at it. But he does not play much now-days. Well if they are not interested the whole deal with chess engines is not very relevant to them. They aren't going to bother to figure out how to edit winboard.ini and they most certainly won't pay $50 for a commercial product either. >I have made a typo in a line of winboard.ini at least 100 times (in perhaps 5000 >edits). I am a pretty good typist (at one time 60 WPM, but well under that now >as I am out of practice). When you do that, Winboard just exits with no clue as >to what went wrong. That's funny, I'm a pretty bad speller but always get it right with winboard :) >The average user is not going to know to put a /debug line >in the extra options to decipher the problem. Ehh? It shouldn't be hard to figure out that the problem is with the edited line. ;) >>Even it if were, they could just install Arena instead. >>Arena can scan your harddrive for available engines, so all you have to do is >>download them and unzip them. > >Arena asks where to scan. This assumes several things. First, that you have >successfully installed Winboard engines. After all, why are you scanning if >they are not there already. So the cart is before the horse. And secondly, it >assumes that you know the area where you should scan. People do not have to >memorize that sort of detail. AFAIK all windows programs ask for paths when they install, that is simply a good policy. Usually there is a default option available of course. I really don't see anything different between the Fritz GUI and Arena in this respect. The Fritz GUI comes with some engines pre-installed, so does Arena. The Fritz GUI requires the user to setup the EGTBs, so does Arena. The Frtiz GUI needs the user to manually install new UCI engines, Arena can do this automaticly by a scan. The Fritz GUI can connect to servers, so can Arena only to many more servers. The Fritz GUI can do engine tournaments, so can Arena. Neither Fritz GUI or Arena is bugfree. Arena can do FRC, Fritz GUI can't. One could even claim Arena is _more_ user friendly :) >Arena makes lots of mistakes. Perhaps 5% of my engines do not work at all under >Arena. Five percent is not a lot of mistakes if you think about all the buggy engines it has to support. Fritz GUI solves the problem by not supporting them at all, do you really consider that to be a better solution? >Most technical people think like you do. "But it's just so easy!" >Of course it is, when you have already learned it and are keenly interested in >that sort of thing. > >To the extreme case, it is like the linux users who imagine that grandma will >simply do a recursive grep to find her mincemeat pie recipie (piped to sed and >tex for some nice formatting). I think you underestimate people, everybody who is motivated can figure out these things for themselves. Take my mother for instance, she has always been a techno-phobic, I have to set her VCR clock and I also had to help her setting up the internet. It's always been that way. But you know what, the next time I came after having installed her inter she surprised me by having set up the outlook email box all alone. She simply wanted her email to work and wasn't going to wait for me to do it! Knowing my mother this was really a big and pleasent surprise. :) That is why I am sure that anybody who has the desire to save some mony and try the free chess software will also get winboard to work, it simply isn't that hard once you put your mind to it. The real problem is that a lot of people don't want to put their mind to it! -S.
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