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Subject: Re: M$ goes Chess?!?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 13:57:40 01/05/99

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On January 05, 1999 at 15:19:09, Peter Kappler wrote:
[snip]
>"Much stronger" is pretty vague.  This could mean 50 ELO points or 200 ELO
>points, depending on your point of view.  Can you be more specific in your
>answer?
Perhaps orders of magnitude stronger.  I worked at Microsoft for about 10 years
and I can tell you that they have a large number of very talented people who
work there.  You may imagine some giant pool of chowderheads, but that is
incredibly inaccurate (though they do have there share, just like anywhere
else).  Eugene Nalimov works for MS, for instance.  Do you think he might
possibly be able to coordinate a chess programming effort?  I do.   While I do
not always agree with some of the sort of marketing decisions they make and some
of their heavy-handed tactics, I can tell you that Microsoft is a formidable
foe.  They have the resources to hire the original architects of Deep Blue.
They could buy their own wafer fab and turn out a billion baby-blue chips.  They
might implement them in GaS and have something faster than before.

>My personal opinion is that they *might* be able to build something that is
>50-100 points stronger than other top commercial programs.
They can do pretty much anything they want to.  The only question is, "Do they
want to?"  If Microsoft thought that an expenditure in resources for a chess
program would bring the highest possible return (compared to other
opportunities) then they *would* create a formidable program.  It would be very
powerful.  It would be very easy to use.  It would have a 500 page on-line
manual.  And it would crash every so-often.




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