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Subject: Re: Drawbacks of UCI

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 08:43:32 07/24/03

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On July 24, 2003 at 10:45:33, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On July 24, 2003 at 09:38:10, Sune Fischer wrote:
>
>>I agree whith those saying it is easier to implement, but the reason for that >is that the engine is running in a dumber state.
>
>To a certain extent, this is true.  Personally I have no problems with this,
>but I understand very well that not all programmers are satisfied.
>
>>As you well know, at each move the position is setup'ed again.
>>Normally this will clear hash-, killer- an historytables.
>
>This I really do not understand.  Why should a program clear these tables
>between the moves when running in UCI mode?

It shouldn't IMO and I don't do it, but I consider that to be a work around.

Usually it is best to clear the hash when analyzing, otherwise you will have old
entries taking up valuable space.
In UCI the engine doesn't know it is playing a game, so it can't tell whether
the positions are related and if it will be able to reuse some of the old data.

You can try and work around it, by trying to find out if the engine is involved
in a game or not. But again, this is ugly and not the intention with UCI.

>>This is good if you want 100% reproducable games, it is bad if you want to play
>>bullet or reuse information from move to move, ie. some of the efficiency is
>>lost.
>
>I still don't follow you, I'm afraid.  The only potential problem I can
>see is that it is slightly difficult for the engine to know when a new game
>is started.

In UCI the engine _shouldn't_ worry about when a new game starts, that is the
"point" of the protocol, and it is exactly the thing I don't like about it. :)

In winboard the engine has to perform all the roles that a normal human
chessplayer has to do. It must think for itself about all the little things,
about the whole game strategy. Like you get the name and rating of your
opponent, you can decide your evaluation (contempt factor) on that etc. Winboard
is more human like chess, uci is more objective robotic analysis chess.

-S.



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