Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 10:56:06 03/26/01
Hello People, Why design a protocol for auto232 player? That is the basic question. My interpretation is that this protocol needs to be followed to play games at the auto232 player then. The protocol as designed by Chrilly and Stefan is having a number of commands. The most important is that one is called 'slave' and the other is 'master'. Now being master says shit about whether you play better chess, but it says something about what your function is within the protocol. If you are master, then your function is to start the game and afterwards ship your opponent the command to save the game. Let's first discuss the chesspartner interface which is used for Gambit Tiger. Gambit Tiger is giving very little problems on the auto232 player, let's start mentionning that. It doesn't have big demands to play a game. It's happy very soon. No need to have a machine with zillions of megabytes of RAM, no need to have 7.5 GB of EGTBs on the harddisk before it start playing. It plays no problems there. however, WHY does it have an UNMARKED checkbox by default to let the other guy save the game when Tiger is Master. This means the opponent is by default NOT ALLOWED to save the game. This is very unfair behaviour. It's like playing a grandmaster for the first time, then ship the grandmaster to a clinic. They operate him and he has lost all memories about the game! Of course you can avoid this by difficult programming. So saving the game during the game already. Learning during the game etcetera. BUT WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE PROTOCOL THEN? In my opinion it is UNFAIR to by default leave this checkbox unmarked. In the default settings it must be marked! The same applies to chessbase products but even worse. First it is very worried about having the right openings book to auto232 play. Secondly it wanted more hashtables and at least a machine with 128mb RAM. Further it wants all EGTBs installed on harddisk. Only after all those criteria are met, then finally fritz wants to auto232 play. The first box you see then it already has by DEFAULT UNMARKED a markbox which will ship a 'save game' command to the opponent after the game. This is pretty unfair! So it wants itself the BEST POSSIBLE conditions, like at least 128mb RAM, a lot of EGTB installed. Hundreds of megabytes of harddisk for a big openingsbook etcetera. All those criteria it wants in order to not even by default give the opponent a 'save game' command after the game, DESPITE THAT THIS IS THE PROTOCOL! Now people can legally complain that their protocol looks like Chrilly/Stefans protocol, but that it is not the same, and that the only differences are that by default chessbase ships some extra commands in order to recognize whether on the other side is also a chessbase program and that the other thing is to by default leave the 'save game' for the opponent is unmarked. all legal crap. JUST GIVE THE SAVE GAME COMMAND by default. That chessbase wants their own main product to win the auto232 matches somehow by shipping commands to other chessbase interfaces to get certain things done, that is completely their own responsibility and decision. Quite logical decision actually. I would want Fritz to win too if it was my main product. I'm not here to speak for how chessbase must run their company. That is their own business. But i'm here for those who want a fair match between non-chessbase products and a chessbase product, as well as chesspartner-tiger, which in future also is going to lose from Fritz as i understood. I understand that programs not learning are greatly influenced by this default unmark trick. You can produce your own PGNs and only those can get interpreted, whereas opponent is NOT allowed to show as slave the pgn, except if that programmer works around this. Much easier as everyone doing a hell of a lot of effort is simply to give everyone that 'save game' command.
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Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
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