Author: Odd Gunnar Malin
Date: 01:57:19 04/23/02
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On April 23, 2002 at 03:39:01, Martin Bauer wrote: >Hello, > >can someone help mem with these two questions: > > - Is winboard comunication done by stdin/out with plain text commands, as in >UCI? Yes. > - Must in winboard the engine be able to listen stdin even while thinking? > I would say yes here too, maybe the protocol don't say this but it would be hard for a user if this isn't implemented. If you f.ex. start a game and had set the timecontrol accidently to long time and see this when the engine start to think. Then you have to wait for the engine to move before you could fix this. There is a designer difference between these two protocols too. If you look at a complete chess-program as three boxes: GUI <-> Frontend <-> Engine Where: GUI is the board where you get the opponents move and give back your move. Frontend keep the record of what’s going on (score sheet) and communicate with the engine and GUI. It alo check if it could get the move from an opening book. Engine is the pure chess-engine that needs a position to think about. The Winboard protocol is then a protocol that is suitable between the GUI and the Frontend when the UCI protocol is best between the Frontend and the Engine. Thereby Winboard’s main commands are to send and receive moves, clock, new game, draw, resign etc. when in the UCI protocol the position is the main part. The moves is also sent in the UCI protocol but how else to send 3.rep information. There is also a mechanism in the UCI protocol to set up the engine with proper parameters (hash, style etc.) but it isn’t hard to do this for Winboard engines either (ex. Crafty in CA). Because of some lack of some information in the UCI protocol that force the engine to let the GUI (eg. Frontend) take some decision I would guess we will get some discussion on the next comp-tournament since there are some engines now that is uci-only. Odd Gunnar
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