Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

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

Author: Mike Hood

Date: 15:52:57 01/25/02

Go up one level in this thread


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.

Thanks for your thoughts, Dann, but you didn't really answer my question. This
is my point:

Winboard has one big advantage over UCI. If a programmer wants to write a new
Winboard engine from scratch he downloads the attractive Winboard GUI for free
and gets stuck into the programming. Tim Mann's software is well tested, and so
the programmer can put all his effort into debugging his own code.

But what about UCI? If a programmer wants to write a UCI engine, his first step
is to spend money on Shredder or another Chessbase product. This is enough of a
disadvantage to encourage the programmer to stay with Winboard. If the Universal
Chess Interface is to be promoted seriously, there MUST be a freeware GUI made
available.




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.