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Subject: Re: Is UCI a politically viable alternative to Winboard?

Author: Miguel A. Ballicora

Date: 15:21:35 01/25/02

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On January 25, 2002 at 17:49:11, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On January 25, 2002 at 17:37:15, Mike Hood wrote:
>
>>From all that I've read about UCI, it seems to have several technical advantages
>>over Winboard.
>
>Name one.
>
>>But, as we all know, the best product doesn't always succeed.
>>
>>There will only be large support among chess engine programmers if there is a
>>high quality free GUI available. (If UCI interpreatation remains proprietary to
>>Chessbase it will kill the protocol before it even takes off). Is there a
>>comparable freeware equivalent of the Winboard program (WinUCI)? If not, are
>>there any plans to create one?
>
>Why not trash UCI and all the other pretender interfaces, and go with the open,
>well adopted, flexible specification:
>Winboard.

After I read the UCI specification and a brief discussion in the WB forum
I came to the conclusion that there very few advantages of UCI but does not
compensate the huged disadvantages that has compared to winboard.
For instance, you can hardly do any learning under UCI. You cannot do pondering
the way you like, you do it the way the GUI like. i.e. the way most of the
people do it, but it is very restrictive IMHO. No new ideas are possible here.
Winboard is extremely flexible and after WB prot II, growing will be painless.
The feature command is absolutely great.
The few advantages that UCI has, won't exist anymore with the new flexible
features that for sure will be added to the "feature" command. WB III will be
the way to go.
In fact, right now, any GUI programmer could add their own features without
breaking the protocol. How about that?

Regards,
Miguel





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