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Subject: Re: UCI versus Winboard

Author: Bas Hamstra

Date: 10:44:54 08/21/02

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>>"gui taking control". I say handle some basic stuff right once, so 50 engines
>>don't have to invent the wheel.
>
>I don't consider "pondering" to be "basic stuff".  There are dozens of ways
>to do it, and that should be left to the engine completely...  Ditto for
>opening book, endgame tables, etc...

Yes, but somehow I don't think you are convincing here. Crafty pondering under
UCI or under Winboard, the *effect* is 100% the same. As soon as you sent your
pondermove the engine WILL start pondering that move. Why should you care how it
is triggered as long as the result is the same? Isn't it only a sentiment?

What matters is that the end-user has the highest level of control, and UCI
provides it a lot more than WB. You mention book: the UCI gui can be instructed
to use the engine book OR the gui book OR both. You point the gui to where the
TBs are ONCE and it knows for all engines. You don't like it? No problem, you
create your own engine-specific option for it. Same for book/hash/whatever is in
your crafty.rc file.

>> It leads to more stability IMO. Actually the
>>"control" is no big deal at all. If the engine has provided a pondermove, the
>>gui WILL instruct it to ponder that move. _Always_. What's the problem with
>>that?
>
>Just think about it for a minute.  We already have problems with auto232
>matches and strange things going on.  I'm not about to let some foreign
>piece of software control what/when my engine does things.  That is for my
>engine to decide, on its own.

Auto232 is a piece of trash that can do unpredictable things. The average UCI
gui is completely predictable and reliable. You name book/TB/pondering, in all
these cases you can make Crafty-UCI behave exactly the same as Crafty-WB. But it
would be a lot more user-friendly.

>>have ease of use and stability, the engine programmers get great gui's with a
>>lot of extra options, the gui builders finally have a robust protocol.
>
>You say that like winboard is not robust.  Which I don't understand.  It has
>been robust enough for me to play nearly a million games on ICC/FICS/chess.net
>with no problems of any kind.  Not to mention playing matches for testing on
>my local machine.

Well I just checked an older Crafty and let me give you an example. While Crafty
is pondering, I give the "easy" command. Crafty responds "pondering
disabled"...and happily continues pondering. Depending on the phantasy of the
programmer, another engine may behave different. To quote another example: do
you know exactly what will happen, if during pondering you give it a "setboard"
command? UCI only handles commands in force mode, that's the way to do it.

>>You say so now. But my UCI code is 400 lines, clean, and rock-solid. That is
>>simply impossible with Winboard. That says something about the protocols.
>
>Note that simple != better...

If the result is the same it IS better...

Best regards,
Bas.



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