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Subject: Re: UCI & ICC

Author: Russell Reagan

Date: 18:15:01 08/24/02

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On August 24, 2002 at 20:54:02, Steve Timson wrote:

>Hi,
>
>  I have followed a bit of the discussion about UCI over the last couple days.
>I am currently slowly working on a rewrite of my engine (Chester).  One of the
>reasons for the rewrite is that my game state management code (among other
>parts) was unpleasant.  I would say this was my fault, not the xboard
>protocol's, but regardless it was something that always bugged me.  This time
>around I am going slowly and doing things "right" the first time.

IMO, if you are wanting to do it "right", then I would stick with Winboard,
because eventually there is going to be a protocol version 3 which should fix
the problems people have with Winboard. Of course, UCI may get an upgrade as
well, so you never know. UCI is probably easier to implement though if you're
having bugs because of the quirkiness of the Winboard protocol.

>  I haven't followed the discussion here much lately, and so my knowledge of UCI
>support out there is limitted.  I will want to attach to ICC and play automated
>games, potentially leaving the engine running for hours or days on end.  Is
>there an interface out there that supports automated ICC play with a UCI engine?

Arena does this. Arena supports Winboard engines as well as UCI engines, and it
will allow you to connect to ICC (or FICS, or wherever).

>  One other question as well -- in these implementations of UCI, can you pass
>command line arguments to the engine?  I don't see anything about this in the
>spec.

I believe (but don't remember for sure) that both Winboard and Arena will let
you do this. Arena has a nice "debug window" that will let you see everything
that Arena sends to your engine, and everything that your engine sends back.
Very helpful if you're having a problem.

Hope this helps.

Russell



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