Author: Richard A. Fowell
Date: 13:36:10 01/07/05
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On January 07, 2005 at 08:57:47, ERIQ wrote: <snip> > >To date hiarcs, cm9000, deep sjeng and ruffian are the only commercial engines >available and two of the four are loosely supported at best ie. deep sjeng and >ruffian. Yet you make this list seem good ?! You are disappointed in a list that includes cm9000, deep sjeng and ruffian, and (soon now) a current version of HIARCS, and say "Yet you make this list seem good". How did you feel one year ago, when none of these engines were even prospective possibilities, and cm6000 and HIARCS 7 were the strongest chess programs on the Mac? Obviously, it isn't as nice as the list on the PC, and I would like to make it better. But it is heroicly better than it was a year ago. >Do you think mac and linux people would like to see other big names like: >shedder, fritz, junior, and chesstiger? Sure. I have been actively working for over a decade to make that list better, and if you want to do something constructive to help me with that, I would welcome it. There are lots of things that users can do to help improve the chess software on their platform. Be very clear on one thing, though - it isn't that the programmers are lazy, it is that the rewards for putting their engines into the Mac market have been poor. The Chessbase database was on the Mac market for a while, then they stopped. HIARCS was on the Mac market in the late 90s for two versions, and then stopped. Chess software on the Mac just didn't return enough money to be worth the effort. Even when HIARCS (late 1990s) has head and shoulders the strongest chess program available for the Macintosh, it didn't make enough money to justify the effort. And that was despite a lot of unpaid effort on my part to help HIARCS succeed, including very extensive beta testing, writing chess software review articles in Inside Mac games, the BMUG and LAMG newsletters, GambitSoft and elsewhere, writing and distributing an unofficial patch to enhance HIARCS, and benchmarking HIARCS Mac vs. HIARCS PC to show that (for that version of HIARCS) the Mac was a faster platform for HIARCS than it seemed. So - what can we do to make it attractive to port good chess engines to the Mac? The classic economic approach is to lower the cost of putting good software on the Mac, and increase the return. One way of lowering the cost is to provide Mac OS/X host software that will take care of the GUI issues, such as Jose. Jose (http://jose-chess.sourceforge.net/) supports both X-board and UCI protocols, and I conjecture this is part of the reason that Ruffian and Deep Sjeng are available as OS/X UCI engines currently. I think the current work on Sigma Chess to support HIARCS through a UCI interface will help encourage more chess engines there as well. Another way to lower the cost of putting good software on the Mac is for users to volunteer to provide high-quality, unpaid testing as beta testers. By high-quality, I mean thorough test coverage of program features, testing on multiple configurations, narrowing down problems to specific, repeatable scenarios, and providing constructive, implementable suggestions for improvement. I have been doing that on the Mac and Palm OS for many authors, but this is one direct way to help improve the quality of the product. Many of the things that I as a user wanted in a chess program exist in MacChess because of the time I spent with the author testing the program and making suggestions and other contributions (such as creating a piece set). Now lets talk about the return side. There are relatively few Mac owners, of whom relatively few buy chess software, of whom relatively few buy HIARCS-class software, of which a relatively small fraction of the proceeds go to the programmer. Although I have influenced a few purchases, I can't imagine I've made much of an impact on the number of Mac owners, though I have done things such as join Macintosh user groups, provide free Mac consulting, purchase Macs at my company, and provide CD-Rs filled with hand-picked quality freeware and shareware as Christmas presents to every Mac owner I knew. As far as the fraction of Mac users who actually buy chess software, and high quality chess software, at that, I've tried to influence this through publicity. This includes writing chess software reviews for such magazines as Inside Mac Games, the BMUG newsletter, the LAMG newsletter, and an article in the past year in some Mac magazine I don't remember. I also make sure the authors are aware of the opportunities for free publicity offered by the Macintosh software indices offered by Apple, Versiontracker and the like. The real high-leverage point though, is the fraction of the money going to the computer programmers. As indicated in another post in this thread, the fraction of the proceeds that the chess engine programmer gets through the classic software distribution model is relatively small. One radical approach to changing this (as I mentioned in the other message) would be to get a co-op effort to commission the port of a chess engine. That way the fraction of what you as a user pay goes to incentivize the chess engine programmer is much higher. So - what can you do to help change this situation? -Richard
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