Komodo 13.3 released

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

Would you suggest the same business advice for Apple with regard to iPhone releases?

Absolutely yes.

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

We always offer for free the version below the one we have on sale, currently Komodo 11 is on sale very cheap, so Komodo 10 is free.
Suppose we said all updates are free for purchasers, but the price is $100. Then we said if you don't want the updates we would give 40% discount. That would of course be exactly the same as what we are doing now, but perhaps it would look less "greedy"? If we only sold Komodo with a year's updates, the price would probably be in the middle, let's say $80, but I think that on average our customers would be less happy and we would make less money. It's better not to charge people for something they don't want to buy.

I will buy this version of Komodo, but that in the future I will have free updates to the latest version of the engine. Do you agree or not.

[BrendanJNorman]

Would you suggest the same business advice for Apple with regard to iPhone releases?

Absolutely yes.

Okay.

How about...

Would you accept your employer only pay your first salary, but have you work on an ongoing basis, based on that original salary?

That is, would you work forever, if somebody paid you $1000 or even $10,000 once?

[Alayan]

I think that is true with many young authors today, but the majority of the old school authors would perhaps discuss ideas - but they would never look at code from another engines. I seriously doubt that Mark looks at SF code at all period. My opinion , and you made a point insinuating that Komodo authors have taken ideas from SF and I believe that idea is 100% completely false. I agree with your suggestion IF they WERE to do that , they should acknowledge it as such - but for you to suggest they have is totally out of bounds and requires you to know something which you have no way of knowing. One should not indulge in gossip.

You know why in the past engine authors didn't look at the code of other engines ? Because other engines were closed source and it was impossible to do so. That's it.

i'm not insinuating anything. I'm telling clearly that a commercial engine author that doesn't look at all at how Stockfish does things is incompetent, moreso when unable to keep up. I do not believe the Komodo team to be incompetent. I do believe that only extremely naive people believe that the Komodo authors never looked at the Stockfish code for ideas.

The only reason I can't prove it definitely is because Komodo is closed-source, but anybody familiar with trying to gain elo for a strong engine will know that I'm right. Elo is hard to get by, and no engine author can manage to rediscover everything by himself.

What I did NOT say is that Komodo is just copying stuff. I also did not say that looking at the code and ideas of an open source engine would be unethical. To the contrary, it's perfectly fine to do so.

Any engine author knows that just taking a piece of eval or search from somewhere else will fail much more often than succeed. The rest of the eval and search being different, the change won't fit the same way. Sometimes, tuning parameters and doing minor adaptations on conditions will allow the idea to succeed, frequently it will not.

And taking some successful ideas from others do not preclude one to try many original ideas and gaining elo with some of them. I do not doubt that Komodo contains many entirely original ideas, and that some ideas seen in other engines today were discovered there first (but not shared).

Most of the work on Stockfish is in evaluation.

Eval is nice, but the real magic is in the search. To the point that the top shogi engines have been using the Stockfish search with their own evals on top.

About two thirds of the elo gain from Stockfish 11 over Stockfish 10 comes from improved search (tests were done for eval patches only).

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

Okay.

How about...

Would you accept your employer only pay your first salary, but have you work on an ongoing basis, based on that original salary?

That is, would you work forever, if somebody paid you $1000 or even $10,000 once?

Here is a completely different matter.

[Ovyron]

Well, if someone offered the Komodo team $10,000 in exchange for all incoming Komodo versions and updates I'm sure they'd gladly accept the deal!

[BrendanJNorman]

Well, if someone offered the Komodo team $10,000 in exchange for all incoming Komodo versions and updates I'm sure they'd gladly accept the deal!

The point I'm trying to make is that this increasingly common perception that it is somehow immoral to be paid for your labor is false, as long as you are doing nothing to harm others...who cares?

If somebody (or a team) spend hundreds of hours coding, testing and trying to market a NEW product, to me at least, it is immoral to expect them to give it to you for FREE based on some perceived goodwill being earned by buying a previous product.

There is a point to which capitalism definitely goes too far, but this is far from that point.

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

The point I'm trying to make is that this increasingly common perception that it is somehow immoral to be paid for your labor is false, as long as you are doing nothing to harm others...who cares?

If somebody (or a team) spend hundreds of hours coding, testing and trying to market a NEW product, to me at least, it is immoral to expect them to give it to you for FREE based on some perceived goodwill being earned by buying a previous product.

There is a point to which capitalism definitely goes too far, but this is far from that point.

I don't want anything for free.

[Ovyron]

Yeah, so I guess the Komodo team could provide a "buy once, get all future versions of the program for free" package, for a price they deem acceptable. I was getting all the Chiron engines for free just because I gave some feedback, so it's not inconceivable to be able to get them for free for life for paying a large sum of money now.

What is unreasonable is asking to get that for the price of a single Komodo, but there's probably a price Krzysztof Grzelak is willing to pay, and the Komodo team willing to charge.

[Ovyron]

I don't want anything for free.

You're asking to pay for current Komodo and get next versions (Komodo 14, 15, 16, and any future version), for free, aren't you?