Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: General comments

Author: Dan Honeycutt

Date: 13:12:21 06/10/04

Go up one level in this thread


On June 10, 2004 at 04:33:21, Tord Romstad wrote:

>On June 09, 2004 at 16:19:10, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>Parsing SAN is _not_ hard.
>
>Perhaps not extremely hard, but still an unnecessary complication, IMHO.
>A format like "g1f3" or "Ng1f3" is closer to the internal representation
>of moves in almost all chess-related programs.  I find it hard to believe
>that there is a big number of programs which actually stores only the
>type of piece and the destination square, and adds more information only
>when it's necessary to avoid ambiguity.
>
>By using SAN, you make life more difficult for the programs which produce
>the files as well as for programs which read the files.  The programs which
>produce the files are forced to convert it's internal from-to representation
>of moves to SAN, and the programs which read the files have to reverse the
>process.  This seems really silly to me.
>
>SAN is only a good idea when the information is presented to the user.
>It has no place in file formats which are not designed to be read by
>humans, nor in engine communication protocols.
>
>>There is public code to do that in the epd kit as well as inside Crafty
>>itself.
>
>I am not sure what the "epd kit" is, but if you are referring to the
>epd*.c and epd*.h files by Steven J. Edwards which are included in the
>Crafty source code, they are unusable to the majority of chess programmers
>because of their gigantic size.  The epd*.* files alone are bigger than
>the complete source code of my engine, despite the fact that my code has
>grown very bloated.
>
>Tord

I concur with your points Tord and I'll add one more:  when i print a PV the
only move I can correctly disambiguate is the first one because that's the only
one I have the rest of the moves for.  I know from-to-who moved-what they
captured or promoted to but I don't know if I need to disambiguate.  I could
save all the moves for every move in the PV or replay the PV and regenerate the
moves but this would be quite a hastle.

Dan H.




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.