Author: Reinhard Scharnagl
Date: 11:41:44 01/09/04
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Hello, there have been some questions in my e-mails, for which I think it would be good to answered in public. a) Q: what about other games (checkers, go, ...), can UCI be modified to support them? A: as far as I understand in UCI it is only (easy) possible to support strong related chess variants, as I try to do now. I think there should be a way to support other games, but only when their engines also could play traditional chess (it could even be a random move generator, but they have to support the basic UCI commands, when crashing of a GUI should be prevented). I can imagine, an engine to signal a Checkers awareness towards the GUI, which then could handle specific Checkers FEN, which strictly has to be different to other game FENs (e.g. chess or finally Go game). An intelligent GUI would then not send such a Checkers-FEN to non Checkers aware GUIs. b) Q: how about copyrighted games? (e.g. Gothic Chess) A: I do not want to ignore copyrights or patents. The protocol I propose will be able to support Capablanca's Chess. So it is not avoidable for that protocol also to encode Gothic Chess positions, because nearly every such position also could be a Capablanca's Chess position. It would be up to the GUI, not to generate copyrighted starting positions, and it would be the engine task, not to support opening libraries for such patented games (except you are licensed). c) Q: is it possible to change something in the UCI protocol to enhance it? A: well, I think the new protocol should be absolutely downwards compatible. Only that way it could be secured, that old UCI engines still would cooperate with the new GUI. Well sure, I myself would like, that castlings ALLWAYS would be encoded only as O-O or O-O-O. And also it would be nice, when an engine could refuse a situation as illegal, which would allow to build GUIs with less intelligence. But this would create a completle new protocol, what is not, what I want. Regards, Reinhard.
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