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Subject: Re: Is it time for the Winboard Protocol to go the way of the Dodo?

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 10:27:27 03/10/05

Go up one level in this thread


On March 10, 2005 at 11:25:03, Anthony Cozzie wrote:

>On March 10, 2005 at 02:38:08, Sune Fischer wrote:
>
>>On March 09, 2005 at 21:10:08, Anthony Cozzie wrote:
>>
>>>>In UCI, can anyone justify why the entire move history has to be sent for each
>>>>move?
>>>>
>>>>In WB if a series of moves really has to be sent, then you just send the "force"
>>>>command followed by the moves. Otherwise, its just the next single move. That's
>>>>what I'd call 'elegant'.
>>>
>>>WHY DOES EVERYONE BITCH ABOUT THE ***** MOVELIST?  DO YOU ALL RUN ON 8088's?
>>
>>Generally speaking communication costs $.
>>
>>Imagine if your chess program created a socket (e.g. via GPRS) to a
>>chess server, and used UCI to relay moves.
>>You'd be ruined fast.
>
>Lets do the math here.  Each move is 5 bytes (4 coord + space).  If we assume
>the average number of moves is 50 (generous) than UCI involves an overhead of
>50*2 (ponder+normal) * 5 = 500 bytes / move.  On the same computer, this
>probably 1 us.  On a broadband connection, it is something like 2.5 ms.  So,
>even giving you the benefit of the doubt on every point, it still doesn't
>matter.
>
>anthony

That has basically zero relevance to the situation Sune mentioned. Suppose ICC
communicated to clients using UCI. The average bandwidth cost per move would
increase 1000 fold. I suspect some portion of that cost gets passed on to
customers. Basically it would be a bad business decision to use UCI for that
purpose.

If you're using UCI to run a computer match on a single computer, then it
doesn't really matter as long as you're not running blitz games. But that is
only considering a single game at a time, going from a cost of 1 to 1000.
Considering ICC, they're running hundreds or thousands of games simultaneously,
so it might be going from a cost of 1 to 5000000 (as opposed to the cost going
from 1 to 5000).

Speaking of customers, I think it is a drastic overestimate to assume that all
clients will be using broadband internet access. I think it's much more likely
that the average internet user is still using a 28.8 Kbps modem (at least the
half of the world that has even used a computer). Even in the U.S., it was not
long ago that people payed for internet access by the hour, and had limits and
extra fees depending upon how much bandwidth was used.



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