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Subject: Re: r.g.c.c. repost DEATH TO FEN. Was:Re: PGN versus EPD - a battle to the

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 10:25:02 10/01/98

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On September 30, 1998 at 15:57:25, Tim Mirabile wrote:

>On September 30, 1998 at 13:57:50, Danniel Corbit wrote:
>
>>I have changed my mind about EPD.  I used to think it was without value, but
>>now I work with it almost exclusively!
>>Where is the annotation in FEN for the best possible move?
>>Where is the annotation in FEN for the moves to avoid?
>>Where is the annotation in FEN for depth of study in plies?
>>Where is the annotation in FEN for nodes analyzed?
>[...]
>>How will you do this with FEN?  Here is my 180 degree turn (I used to like
>>FEN):  FEN sucks.  I hate FEN.  Death is too good for FEN.  Down with FEN.
>>Destroy FEN.  Get rid of it.  No, really.
>
>This all makes no sense to me.  EPD and FEN have different uses.  FEN is used in
>a pgn game database to store a game position and the continuation for which the
>initial moves are not known.  How can you store the players names and the rest
>of the set of PGN tag pairs, plus the remaining moves of the game, in an EPD
>string?

FEN is something that is used, when I am at a chess tournament, and want to
write down the position on one board so I can use it later.  I had been using
FEN for fifteen years before I discovered that it had an application in computer
chess.

EPD is something that exists to support test suites, as far as I can tell.  It
is supposed to let you describe a position and predicted subsequent events.
There is no contact with the preceding game context, other than that you have a
50-move counter in the embedded FEN.  An odd thing about EPD is that when you do
your search, you are expected to do a dump in the form of an EPD.  I think this
is pretty strange, but apparently useful.

PGN is a game archive format.  It is supposed to record chess games.  That
people use it to make suites is something of a corruption of PGN, made possible
by support of the FEN tag.  For all that, I like the idea of using it for
suites, you can take the combinations section of an Informant and just go for
it.

bruce



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