On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 09:07:10AM +0200, "Ingo Althöfer" wrote:
> "Petr Baudis" <[email protected]>
> > We still don't have a good publicly available tsumego
> > solver. I think this makes their capabilities a lot less useful for
> > game analysis.
>
> Agreed. Concerning tactics, time is not really ripe, yet.
(I also think that it's algorithmically a lot more complicated to build
these analysis tools for Go, for example adding a good tsumego solver to
your program. You need a very different approach than what you do for
general game playing; it's just a lot more work to get there. But I'm
not that familiar in Chess, maybe implementing specific analysis is also
complicated there.)
> > > ... And for that it would be very helpful to have a few popular top
> > > players
> > > using it.
> >
> > So my main hypothesis is that the English-speaking market is very
> > small, and the East Asian language barrier(s) prevent a lot of network
> > effects to kick in;
>
> The analysis does not need to be English-based. For me, Japanese or Korean
> interface software would also be nice, but currently there is also no
> good analysis software in the Asian market.
But you need to do marketing, write documentation, user interface,
recruit pro players... it can't be all pictograms and a single play
store entry. And most importantly, talk to the users, spread the word
and hear feedback. If I wanted to make a commercial Go program (I have
thought about it, many years ago), having no good access to East Asian
market was the main turn-off. I don't think it pays off to target
western market primarily in Go. [*]
Of course, there are programs which are known and popular in East Asia.
But your pool of programmers is much smaller - you must come from East
Asia, or have a local company as a distributor.
(If I take a model example of CrazyStone as a program crossing the
barrier I mentioned, it uses a local producer to do the marketing and
distribution. But I don't think the feedback flow is that good there,
it seems to me that it produces results which are what the programmer
wants (the strongest possible Go program), not so much what the user
wants (a tool for improving their Go). This is *not meant as
a criticism* of Remi, I would (I did!) end up doing the same thing!
Just a case study. :) For a Western programmer, trying to enter East
Asian markets as the "Matthias Wuellenweber" of Go, you need to find
your "Frederic Friedel" as a true partner fluent in that geo area,
which is challenging.)
[*] Unless you could play a very long game, trying to use this and
targetting the Western market to level the strength field in Go.
--
Petr Baudis
If you have good ideas, good data and fast computers,
you can do almost anything. -- Geoffrey Hinton
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