Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 14:35:26 08/21/02
Go up one level in this thread
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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