I respect your opinion, but for many users one version per year is perfectly adequate. Not everyone wants to be continuously installing development builds that add 1.7 Elo compared to last week's version.APassionForCriminalJustic wrote:The issue with what you are doing is that you release one version every year approximately which is pointless. Three months down the road Houdini 6 will be old news like every other compile that gets created. Stockfish 8 is already dead in the grass. If you went to a subscription -based model then it would give people, like myself, more incentive to invest money into your product. Annual releases just do not mean much.
Secondly, until Stockfish is dethroned it's still number one. You're fighting a community with vast resources. Development might be slow right now, but the other way will surely come. The community will always win. It's not an engine reliant on one person or two fellows - but a group of individuals dedicated to the cause of creating the world's strongest engine.
So forget about IPON. Let's wait and see what Houdini can do face to face versus the development version, and if Houdart can continue with his surge.
Secondly, all the better! Houdini and Stockfish are no enemies; Houdini development is a drive for SF development, and vice versa.
Why should we forget about IPON? It's usually a very reliable data point in a sea of uncertainty. You can easily estimate where the current SF dev version would be in the list, probably around 25 points better than SF 8.