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Subject: Re: General comments

Author: Dan Honeycutt

Date: 17:29:00 06/09/04

Go up one level in this thread


On June 09, 2004 at 17:02:30, Russell Reagan wrote:

>On June 09, 2004 at 16:30:20, Anthony Cozzie wrote:
>
>>The e2e4 format is terrible because it is difficult to read for humans (uh, what
>>piece did he move?).
>
>This is not an issue. No one is going to be reading XML files. Or at least, that
>isn't the intent. The intent should be that it is easy for everyone to support a
>standard that meets our needs, including the shortcomings of existing standards.
>
>Even if people did read chess XML files, they would have to be a hell of a
>blindfold player to know the position after 50 moves, regardless of whether they
>know what piece was moved or not. So what is the point in adding complexity to
>the standard?
>
>>Admittedly parsing SAN is not hard (Zappa has a SAN parser)
>>but Long algebraic (Nf3xe5) is easier for humans and computers both.
>
>Nf3xe5... Uh, what piece was captured? ;-)
>
>I like long algebraic also. When we talk about the difficulty of supporting SAN,
>we have to consider relative difficulty. No, it is not difficult to support SAN,
>but compared to coordinate notation, it _is_ difficult. Any kid a week into his
>first high school programming class could support coordinate notation. Not a
>chance for supporting SAN. That would be a semester long (or year long?) project
>:-)
>
>By the way, did you write your own SAN parser, or did you borrow code? If you
>wrote your own, does it _really_ support SAN? i.e., would your program read
>moves like Lxf7? I don't know if that is really in the SAN standard or not, but
>I've seen people from other countries post PGN containing moves like that. With
>coordinate notation, there are no such problems with internationalization. SAN


not quite - you still have the issue of promotions.  But I agree with what you
said elsewhere in this thread that for an internal representation readability
should not be a primary concern.  the only thing I find comfortable to read is
pure SAN using PNBRQK - the hardest to parse and language dependant.  for an
internal representation I like e2e4 or e7e8=4.

Dan H.


>and long algebraic both have that issue to deal with. To me, that seems like
>something the GUI or conversion tool should deal with, not something an engine
>programmer should worry about.



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