Author: martin fierz
Date: 19:35:34 11/14/01
hi, i have written a checkers program and a checkers interface which is somewhat similar to winboard. there is also another checkers engine available which plugs into my interface. recently, a commercial checkers programmer asked me if we shouldnt try to use the same communication between interface and engine, because then he could plug in my (free) engine in his program, and vice versa, his engine could be plugged into mine. we both thought this sounded like a good idea until we realized that there are many possibilities for cheats with such a solution. for example, if i know the communication protocol and have his engine, i could write a program which tries to find all his opening book moves. i could also optimize my book so that it does well against his program, because i can now automate testing, since i can communicate directly with his engine. after discussing these problems, we decided that it was not a good idea. at least, we couldnt find a workaround. in chess, there are many interfaces which support multiple engines which potentially have the same problems. can anybody tell me if there is a solution to these problems (book stealing, optimizing against another engine, finding killer lines against a particular engine), or if this is just the price to pay for a common interface? of course, for the users of the programs it would be great if they could just switch engines at their liking, so it would be something nice to have. aloha martin - just moved to hawaii ;-)
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