Author: Dave Gomboc
Date: 10:41:13 11/14/99
Go up one level in this thread
On November 14, 1999 at 06:46:10, Bella Freud wrote: >In my opinion the greatest attacks on Mr Hyatt come from commercial and wannabee >commercial programmers who have benefited mostly from Mr Hyatt's code and ideas, >but now want to distance themselves from the man himself in order to pretend to >themselves that they did it "alone". When I first read this, I thought it was a dig at a particular poster. Upon re-reading it, I guess it doesn't have to be. Most of the commercial programmers had something that was pretty good before Crafty became available. They are all competing against each other, but I think that Crafty's existance makes it even more imperative that they improve their program each year, because that program anyone can download for free is steadily improving as well. I don't have any particular insight into the vendor aspect of things. I do know that non-mass market chess programs are generally priced significantly less than they were a few years ago. Is this Crafty's fault? I don't know... probably not completely, but I think it was a factor. Another factor is that organizations like ChessBase have developed an commercial-quality interface that engines hook into, so many authors focus more on the engine, instead of spending a lot of their time worrying about an interface to accompany it. With regards to ideas, I think simple observation is enough to claim that commercial programs have recently began to include features that first became prominent in Crafty. Collectively, though, commercial programmers have injected enough tidbits into CCC that I think Crafty would improve a fair bit more if Bob pursued them. Of course, that's just my opinion... and because I've never written a complete chess program, and Bob has been doing this for a looong time, he is free to tell me that I don't know snot. <grin> Dave
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.