Author: Steven Edwards
Date: 13:41:08 07/22/04
Symbolic: Status report 2004.07.22 Work continues on the CTXboard class, and now most of the xboard protocol version 2 commands are fully handled. Everything needed for automated matches is now operating; however, there are still several commands used for interactive play that are not yet hooked up to Symbolic's toolkit. Some of these, like "remove" and "undo" won't be too hard to implement. Others, like "sd" and "edit" aren't really worth the effort and I'll probably leave them out of the CTXboard implementation. The toolkit allows for a time control with three segments: each segment specifies a move count, a time allocation, and an increment. One, two, or three segments may be present in a time control. If a sudden death (move count equals zero) segment is present, there can be only one and it must be the last segment. If the last segment isn't a sudden death segment, then it repeats in play until the game ends. I designed the CTTimeControl class and the CTTCSegment class to support just about every tournament I've seen advertised; none that I recall had more than three time control segments. However, there is still some work to be done in the toolkit for actual pre-search time allocation. At the moment it only understands about sudden death single segment time controls, and it allocates nominal search time by dividing the remaining time by thirty. Simple, but it seems to work okay. Now that automated matches are supported I can better test non sudden death controls, so that topic is high on the priority list. Alas, Crafty only supports a two segment time control and xboard can handle only a single segment time control, so testing of multiple segment controls will have to wait. I've been looking at the zippy portion of xboard for enabling ICS play. My working assumption is that xboard can handle the details as long as I pass it the correct command line options and a working ICS login script file. Perhaps I will get around to testing this next month. To speed up the automated matches, I've added the CTResigner class and hooked it up to CTXboard so that the engine can give up the struggle in a gentlemanly way when things get too rough. The default value of "too rough" in CTResigner will trigger engine resignation when faced with a negative score of at least a rook for five consecutive searches. While there hasn't been much in the way of Lisp work in the past couple of months, nearly all of the work on toolkit issues indirectly supports or extends Symbolic's Lisp program source and so it will all pay off (I hope) when the real Symbolic starts playing full games intelligently.
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