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Subject: Re: Chess960: Arena castle vs X-FEN castle

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 00:56:49 11/06/05

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On November 05, 2005 at 18:29:34, Reinhard Scharnagl wrote:
>
>So for what should FRC be announced, if the engine already had signalled
>its FRC awareness to the GUI? An FRC enable engine always could play FRC,
>there is NO NEED to SWITCH its mode, like the Shredder GUI does, making
>the handling of Chess960 unnecessaryly amd incompatibly complicated.

I agree with Matthias.  That the GUI does not tell the engine that it is
playing FRC is very unfortunate.  Technically speaking, you are of course
correct that an FRC engine can play normal chess, without an explicit mode
shift.  However, many programmers *want* to do things differently in FRC
compared to normal chess.  For instance, I have some rather expensive
evaluation terms which are disabled in normal chess (because they are
irrelevant in that case).  Programmers who don't want to do things
differently in FRC can simply ignore the mode switch.  I don't see any
problem here.

Gothmog, my old engine, was written before the official FRC extensions
to the UCI protocol was introduced.  I had to use the Arena specific
extensions instead.  Because there is no explicit mode switch in
Arena, I had to produce two different executables; one for normal chess
and one for FRC.  That's what I call unnecessary and complicated.

The situation is not very different from analysis mode compared to play
mode.  Some programmers, especially those with an asymmetric evaluation,
want their program to behave differently in analysis mode.  Therefore,
we have the UCI_AnalysisMode (or whatever it is called) UCI option.
Those (like me) who do exactly the same in analysis mode as in play
mode just ignore this option.  You don't think you will find anyone
who complains about it existence.

Tord




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