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Subject: Re: New Winboard protocal and bug?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 18:51:48 01/18/01

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On January 18, 2001 at 15:54:35, David Wilke wrote:

>On January 18, 2001 at 14:43:08, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On January 18, 2001 at 10:11:57, Ulrich Tuerke wrote:
>>
>>>On January 18, 2001 at 10:04:38, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On January 18, 2001 at 09:14:47, David Wilke wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I have noticed that when people just bring a program onto a server, for some odd
>>>>>reason the engine does _not_ respond to the first match request.
>>>>>
>>>>>I have noticed this myself when I tried the new Crafty, yet doesn't happen when
>>>>>using an older version of Winboard.
>>>>>
>>>>>Could this be a bug?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>There is possibly a small timing hole.  Tim uses "ping" after any command
>>>>that might take a while to execute.  When the engine finishes, it then sends
>>>>a "pong".  As the thing first logs on, starting crafty can take a few seconds
>>>>while it sanity-checks the EGTB files.  If a match comes in before crafty says
>>>>"pong" then xboard rejects the match request immediately...
>>>
>>>Winboard sends the ping only in case the engine had registered this feature.
>>>So, older engines (not adapted to protver 2) do not get the "ping" from Tim.
>>>
>>>Uli
>>>>
>>
>>
>>Right.  But he specifically mentioned the "new crafty" which registers this
>>feature.  And that _could_ account for the first match request getting refused
>>by xboard.
>>
>>
>>
>>>>perhaps that is what you are seeing... another program is issuing a match very
>>>>quickly and xboard/engine are not quite ready.
>
>I have tried several other engines and the only ones that seem to have this
>problem are:
>
>Crafty 18.0/18.1
>Little Goliath 3.0
>Comet B27
>
>Many others do not have this problem, including Gandalf, Crafty 17.14 among
>others...
>
>I said I tried it with the new Crafty as that was the first engine I had
>available.


The real question is which support version 2 of the protocol?  You have to
use the "feature" option to turn on "ping/pong".  If you don't, then this
can't ever be a problem.  But crafty has since 18.0 was the version released
specifically for protocol version 2.  A few others may have released versions
for this as well, but probably most of your engines don't.  You can look at the
debug output and see if the engine sends a "feature ping=1" string at any point.
If so, that is a program that might reject the first match request...



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