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Subject: Re: General comments

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 01:33:21 06/10/04

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On June 09, 2004 at 16:19:10, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>Parsing SAN is _not_ hard.

Perhaps not extremely hard, but still an unnecessary complication, IMHO.
A format like "g1f3" or "Ng1f3" is closer to the internal representation
of moves in almost all chess-related programs.  I find it hard to believe
that there is a big number of programs which actually stores only the
type of piece and the destination square, and adds more information only
when it's necessary to avoid ambiguity.

By using SAN, you make life more difficult for the programs which produce
the files as well as for programs which read the files.  The programs which
produce the files are forced to convert it's internal from-to representation
of moves to SAN, and the programs which read the files have to reverse the
process.  This seems really silly to me.

SAN is only a good idea when the information is presented to the user.
It has no place in file formats which are not designed to be read by
humans, nor in engine communication protocols.

>There is public code to do that in the epd kit as well as inside Crafty
>itself.

I am not sure what the "epd kit" is, but if you are referring to the
epd*.c and epd*.h files by Steven J. Edwards which are included in the
Crafty source code, they are unusable to the majority of chess programmers
because of their gigantic size.  The epd*.* files alone are bigger than
the complete source code of my engine, despite the fact that my code has
grown very bloated.

Tord



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