Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 18:01:00 06/10/04
Go up one level in this thread
I am going to summarize my viewpoint here, and leave it at that. Ultimately it
is your format, so you can do whatever you want with it. I am just trying to
give you some advice.
You have 3 options: SAN, Coordinate, and Long SAN
SAN Advantages: Easy for humans to read
SAN Disadvantages: Relatively difficult to parse. See epd.c.
Coordinate Advantages: Easy to parse (1 line).
Coordinate Disadvantage: Difficult for humans to read
Long SAN Advantages: Pretty easy for humans to understand
Easy to parse (1 line)
Long SAN Disadvantages: 2 extra characters over coordinate.
You and Russel say that no one is supposed to be reading these files. I say why
go out of your way to make it hard? Why throw away something that you can get
for free? I can think of any number of scenarios where it would be useful to
look in the file. For example, Zappa makes a questionable move, so I go back
and grep for the move. Then I can read score, ply, PV, etc. I don't know about
you, but I can follow at least 8-10 ply of a PV if it is SAN.
I simply do not see any advantage to coordinate notation over long SAN. Let me
make this clear: coordinate is not easier to parse for computers, but it is much
more difficult for humans to understand. The *only* advantage of coordinate
notation that you save 2 bytes. Coordinate is not too bad when you have the
board in front of you, but when you are recalling something from memory it is
much worse.
The (obvious) international solution is simply to allow any piece type. You are
free to write Xf3xe5 Vd6-d5 or any other random characters you like. The piece
letter is for the human. The only issue is the promotion type, but you'll have
to worry about that anyway for coordinate notation.
What it comes down to is this: is there _any_ point where coordinate is better
than Long SAN?
anthony
This page took 0.01 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.