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Subject: Re: SAN v Coordinate v Long SAN

Author: Anthony Cozzie

Date: 04:59:05 06/11/04

Go up one level in this thread


On June 10, 2004 at 22:27:57, Andrew Wagner wrote:

>On June 10, 2004 at 22:26:19, Andrew Wagner wrote:
>
>>On June 10, 2004 at 21:01:00, Anthony Cozzie wrote:
>>
>>>I am going to summarize my viewpoint here, and leave it at that.  Ultimately it
>>>is your format, so you can do whatever you want with it.  I am just trying to
>>>give you some advice.
>>>
>>>You have 3 options: SAN, Coordinate, and Long SAN
>>>
>>>SAN Advantages:          Easy for humans to read
>>>SAN Disadvantages:       Relatively difficult to parse.  See epd.c.
>>>
>>>Coordinate Advantages:   Easy to parse (1 line).
>>>Coordinate Disadvantage: Difficult for humans to read
>>>
>>>Long SAN Advantages:     Pretty easy for humans to understand
>>>                         Easy to parse (1 line)
>>>Long SAN Disadvantages:  2 extra characters over coordinate.
>>>
>>>You and Russel say that no one is supposed to be reading these files.  I say why
>>>go out of your way to make it hard?  Why throw away something that you can get
>>>for free? I can think of any number of scenarios where it would be useful to
>>>look in the file.  For example, Zappa makes a questionable move, so I go back
>>>and grep for the move.  Then I can read score, ply, PV, etc.  I don't know about
>>>you, but I can follow at least 8-10 ply of a PV if it is SAN.
>>>
>>>I simply do not see any advantage to coordinate notation over long SAN.  Let me
>>>make this clear: coordinate is not easier to parse for computers, but it is much
>>>more difficult for humans to understand.  The *only* advantage of coordinate
>>>notation that you save 2 bytes.  Coordinate is not too bad when you have the
>>>board in front of you, but when you are recalling something from memory it is
>>>much worse.
>>>
>>>The (obvious) international solution is simply to allow any piece type.  You are
>>>free to write Xf3xe5 Vd6-d5 or any other random characters you like.  The piece
>>>letter is for the human.  The only issue is the promotion type, but you'll have
>>>to worry about that anyway for coordinate notation.
>>>
>>>What it comes down to is this: is there _any_ point where coordinate is better
>>>than Long SAN?
>>>
>>>anthony
>>
>>Good summary. You make some excellent points, and I'm beginning to favor your
>>viewpoint a bit more now.
>
>Hmm, as soon as I hit submit on that last post, I had another thought. Your
>obvious international solution doesn't cover promotions. What are you suggesting
>with respect to that?


Actually my obvious internalization solution is Dan Honeycutt's obvious solution
:)  He suggested using 1-5, e.g. e7-e8=2 for a Knight promotion.  99% of
promotions are to queen, so its not really that important for readability.

anthony



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