Re: [gnugo-devel] Publishing manual for GNU Go

[bump]

Opus wrote:

> > I sort of doubt that it is appropriate to publish it as a book.
> > The program is very much in flux so the documentation becomes
> > quickly out of date. 
> 
> Will an older version of the manual be so out of date as to be
> unusable after 1 year?  Two years?  

and

> > Moreover the market for it will be rather small.
> 
> Actually, I am surprised that you say that.  There is a huge market
> for classical games, especially programs at a high level.  By
> distributing the book with binaries (including a Windoes version), I
> think it will bring the program to the attention of people who
> otherwise would never find out about it.

A small portion of the manual is for users of the program. Most
of it is documentation explaining how the program works and how
to improve it. Casual users may not find the manual very useful.

> However, I am not familiar with the "Go universe". Is there already a
> widely commercially available program in bookstores that GNU Go would
> be going head-to-head with?

The idea of selling GNU Go in bookstores as a book/CD combination
is interesting. For a while Trevor Morris was distributing a
GNU Go CD.

But the book would have to be different than the existing texinfo
doc, which does not include an introduction to Go or information
useful to Go players. It's a hacker's guide to the internals of
the program.

There are commercially available Go programs which are stronger
than GNU Go. In the recent tournament in Gifu, GNU Go placed 6-th
in a fairly large field. (We were pleased with this result.) 
Of the programs that placed above GNU Go some are commercially
available.

And as long as commercial programs are a little stronger the
market for such a book/CD combination is limited. I think that
eventually GNU Go could be the top program, though this will not
necessarily happen because other programs are being improved too.

GNU Go's strength, and its attraction is that the source code is
available. But most gamers are not going to start trying to hack it.

Do you play Go?

Dan