Author: Lance Perkins
Date: 22:35:46 09/26/05
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On September 27, 2005 at 00:32:32, Robert Hollay wrote: >On September 26, 2005 at 23:46:59, angela milazzo wrote: > >>Dear Sirs; >> >> Are you talking about a dongle? If so I nor my friends will buy your product. >>I will not attach such a device to mine or any one else's machine, they are >>hideous. You are just making it tougher on your legitimate customers, Crackers >>will crack that dongle despite whatever fool has convinced Fabien otherwise. >> >> >> You know I have been downloading and playing the Winboard engines for many >>years. I am appalled by the fact that as soon as a program takes second place in >>some tournament it immediately goes commercial. For how many years was Crafty >>the number one program and Bob remained freeware. I and some other users will >>stick with the current freeware engines knowing that by this time next year some >>other new engine will be the one to beat. >> >>Thanks, >>Angela > > Nobody forces you to buy commercial ones. I'm using only freeware engines too. >Still, I would buy Fruit just to help Fabien in further development, >but I cannot afford investments of not vital importance now. >Btw, I have a feeling that Fruit2.2 is the "No.1" engine today, it's second >place is only due to the hardware differences in the WCCC tournament. > >Robert I think Zappa is the Number 1 chess engine today, as it demonstrated in the last WCCC. Not Fruit. The difference is not hardware. Its sofware. The Fruit software does not know how to use multiple processors. The Zappa software does. Lets give Fruit and Zappa their own 16-cpu machines to run on - they now run on identical hardware. Which do you think will win most games? Lets say you have an engine with very smart search and well-tuned evaluation. But you wrote that in Z80 assembly. The best Z80 processor tops at 16mhz. Is that the best engine? That thing will get trashed by engines with simpler search and eval but is written for x86 architecture and runs on 3Ghz machines. Perhaps once code is added to Fruit to make use of multiple processors, then it might become the No 1. But who knows too? Zappa may have improved by so much by then. As for becoming commercial, I think Fabien has every right to be compensated for his work. There are commercial engines out there that are inferior to Fruit. Why do they get to demand payment for their use?
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