Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: UCI & ICC

Author: Peter Kappler

Date: 22:15:25 08/24/02

Go up one level in this thread


On August 24, 2002 at 22:30:33, Steve Timson wrote:

>On August 24, 2002 at 21:43:14, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>
>>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.  I am nearing
>>>the time where I want to implement a protocol for connecting to a GUI.  The talk
>>>about UCI was interesting for that reason.
>>>
>>>  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?
>>> Does Fritz 7 or another product do this without using winboard?
>>
>>Arena is a free windows gui that should be able to do this. Chesspartner is a
>>non-free gui, of which you can download a trial version.
>>
>
>Thanks I'll give them a look.
>
>>>  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.
>>>  Sorry if this stuff is common knowledge, I haven't been following things much
>>>lately.  Thanks for the info.
>>
>>I am not sure if you can pass command line parameters, but I suspect yes.
>>However are you sure you want to? You can create specific engine options very
>>easily, that, once exported, the gui will support with a nice windows dialog
>>box. You can specify default values for the options. I can't think of much that
>>you could do with command line parameters that you couldn't do with these
>>options. It is one of the nicest features of UCI.
>>
>>Best regards,
>>Bas.
>
>Well, you may find this crazy (I might soon too), but for now I am coding in
>Java.  In order for a GUI to launch this, I need to be able to have the engine
>command be something like 'java Chester'.  I could write a little piece of C
>code to spawn this process, but it would be nicer if I could just have the GUI
>launch java for me.
>
>Thanks,
> - Steve


Hi Steve,

I had the same problem trying to get my program (also written in Java) to work
with Arena.  I solved it by writing a little batch file to do the startup.
Arena happily accepted 'grok.bat' as the command-line for my engine.

-Peter




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.