TalkChess.com

[Don Dailey]

In private correspondence a lot of people have asked me about the version of Komodo that won the CCT 15 tournament by 1.5 points and competed so well against 16 cores programs in the TCEC, many requesting an opportunity to purchase this program.

The program that competed was our latest development version of Komodo and is approximately 30 ELO stronger. Since I am discontinuing development of Komodo from this code base, we decided that it would be a shame to just orphan such a strong program, so we are offering it as a one-off purchase on the Komodo web site. There are no user discounts for existing customers or anything like that and it's not even part of our normal version scheme, thus we call it Komodo CCT.

Some of you may be wondering why you should purchase this when you have already been promised Komodo 5 MP and in fact many of you have pre-ordered it and have been waiting for some time. The answer for you is that you probably should just wait for Komodo 5.1 MP which will be free for anyone who has already pre-ordered it. We have set the release date to May 28, 2013 which is not a target but a firm date. In fact the program is ready now and working well and we will use the time to make some usability and strength enhancements but we are maintaining a release-ready version at all times so the date will not slip. In the future we plan to do all releases that way with firm dates and we will ship the best of whatever we have on the release date.

As you may have heard, the new MP version is a rewrite, basically a port of Komodo to C++11 and a major code cleanup and it is still a work in progress. As such it is still in a bit more primitive state than Komodo CCT. There is some minor missing knowledge and a lot of cruft stripped out of it. But there is also some things done much better, so we expect this to be a better base to proceed from.

Unfortunately, the Komodo 5.1 MP release is currently about 30 ELO weaker than the new Komodo CCT version when running on 1 core, but of course on 2 cores or more it will play much stronger. It will also be at least as strong as Komodo 5. Even though the strength matches Komodo 5 it is not the same program and internally is closer to Komodo CCT. If you want the strongest possible Komodo running on multi-core machines then Komodo 5.1 MP is what you want. If you are fan of single processor programs then Komodo CCT will be stronger.

After we release Komodo 5.1 MP we will be working to bring it up to, and beyond, the strength level of Komodo CCT. So in November we plan to release the upgrade to Komodo 5.1 MP which will be our strongest program yet running on 1 core or many cores.

If you find any of that confusing, here is a table to help make it clearer: