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Subject: Re: UCI versus Winboard

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 14:35:26 08/21/02

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On August 21, 2002 at 13:44:54, Bas Hamstra wrote:

>>>"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?

No, because I also run crafty in text mode all the time.  And now I have to
have two _different_ ways to ponder...  One where I assume a move and start
thinking instantly, the other where I have to wait to be told to ponder and
what to ponder...

KISS works for me...



>
>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.


It should work fine if I haven't added a bug.  The "easy" was a problem caused
by me, not by winboard.  A line of code has been missing for a long time.  If
you type "ponder off" instead, it works as expected.  "easy" won't affect ponder
until the _next_ ponder cycle...  which is my bug.



>
>>>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...

But _if_...



>
>Best regards,
>Bas.



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