lkaufman wrote:We wouldn't have bothered with contempt if we only cared about playing Stockfish,
Fair enough, from YOUR perspective.
From a Gamer's perspective, I can tell you this......Open up ANY online chess Server like Playchess.com or Infinitychess.com and you will find that 99.99 % of the players using Komodo, Stockfish or one of its derivatives.
NO self-respecting player would be caught dead using ANY other Engine !
It's only in this Forum that people get excited about mostly unheard of Engines. In the real (Gaming) world all Engines except Komodo and Stockfish are simply SNEERED at ! That is the reality ! AND THAT is why it is important for many Komodo users to find the ideal Contempt to use against Stockfish, not simply use an over-defensive contempt 0 !
Regards
I would hope Komodo isn't developed with Playchess etc in mind!
I'm not sure what you mean here. We keep all of the likely uses by our customers in mind. But we don't favor one category of customer over another.
As you have said, I wouldn't want Komodo (or any program!) to be optimized largely for a specific audience, specific testing type or against a specific opponent as was suggested above. (I was also being sarcastic towards playchess )
Dann Corbit wrote:If the Komodo team wants to make money, they will target it for the largest possible audience.
If the playchess crowd is the biggest audience they can reach, they should target that audience.
If they can get shelf space on some major retail sector like ChessMaster did, they should go for that.
Assuming the goal is to make the most money.
Actually our goal is not to make the most money. I mean we don't mind making more money, but it's not the prime directive. We could both make more money doing other things, but having the "best" (however defined) chess engine is our prime goal. So we mostly try to get the highest possible rating on all the rating lists, while also including features and options to please our customers. We don't pay much attention to how this goal affects different categories of customers. Occasionally we will accept a tiny elo loss if it makes the program more useful for most of our customers.
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