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Subject: Re: Winboard interface question - setting up a position

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 21:04:23 01/03/99

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On January 03, 1999 at 16:04:43, Greg Lazarou wrote:

>A simple question :
>
>I'm building a chess engine with a friend and I am trying to
>understand/interpret the Winboard/xboard protocol (we have a bet with a couple
>of folks at work that we can build a chess playing program that can beat them by
>the end of January :-). Specifically my question is regarding the editing of a
>board position:
>
>when setting up a position via the edit commands I see no way in the protocol to
>tell the engine whether castling or en-passant are allowed. I also don't see it
>in the UI of Winboard. What should the engine assume? I'm guessing that if the
>King and Rooks are in their original positions that castling could be assumed
>enabled and en-passant is never enabled - these seem like reasonable defaults
>but how can this be missing from the interface? What does Fritz do with its
>Winboard adaptor?
>
>Greg Lazarou


this is a hole.  You can, in general, check to see if the king is on e1 and a
rook is on h1, and if so, assume white can castle.  FEN takes care of this but
because of gnuchess compatibility, winboard/xboard used the archaic edit command
to set up a position (the initial position is set up via a "new" command and if
you are resuming games on ICC this resumption is set up by feeding your engine
the moves..)



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