Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 10:40:03 03/17/98
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I posted this in the middle of the night, on the weekend. I'm hoping that this post wasn't seen by anyone, rather than that it was ignored by everyone, so I'm posting it again. bruce On March 15, 1998 at 01:13:12, Bruce Moreland wrote: >I just discovered what appears to be a serious problem with PGN: its >"NAG" set (those funky "$" things you find in PGN files) is incompatible >with the Informant's symbol set (also used in ECO). > >For example, if you are reading through ECO and encounter a symbol that >looks like a little circle, it means "greater board room", which I >interpret to mean "space advantage". > >PGN has several ways of specifying a space advantage. Six of them, as a >matter of fact: > > 24 White has a slight space advantage > 25 Black has a slight space advantage > 26 White has a moderate space advantage > 27 Black has a moderate space advantage > 28 White has a decisive space advantage > 29 Black has a decisive space advantage > >The problem is that none of these mean precisely "space advantage", they >all mean something inconveniently more. If you are writing a PGN >reader, and you want to display Informant symbols, you could map all of >these onto the circle symbol, but how do you export the circle symbol >back out to a PGN file? > >There are numerous other examples of this, as a matter of fact, almost >all of the PGN NAGs suffer from this problem. It is hard to even >interpret something very simple like the Informant symbol "=", which in >Informant-language means simply "equal". In PGN you'd have to choose >between: > > 10 drawish position > 11 equal chances, quiet position > 12 equal chances, active position > >What a mess! > >I think that what happened here is that Steven tried to specify >something that was forward-looking, he decided to try to superset the >Informant symbols. But what he did instead was make all of the >Informant symbols untranslatable. > >Also affected are the NIC symbols, which seem to be a fairly proper >subset of the Informant symbols, with many of the same incompatibilities >with PGN. > >Is there anything that can be done to circumvent these problems, or any >reasonable and non-glacial way to fix the PGN standard in such a way >that its NAGS are compatible with existing standards? > >bruce
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