Author: Andrew Platt
Date: 10:12:33 09/21/04
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On September 21, 2004 at 10:17:57, Martin Giepmans wrote: >My engine SpiderChess has been a private engine till now, but I plan to release >it in the near future as a WinBoard engine. >The implementation of the WinBoard protocol is still incomplete (just enough to >play games on ICS) so it will take some time. Please be patient .. > >This week I connected the engine to the Arena gui and everything works fine, as >expected, except for one thing: take back moves. >Under Winboard there is a command "retract move" that sends "remove" to the >engine. This command takes back two moves, the last move of the engine and the >last move of the opponent. >I seems that this command is missing in Arena. Or did I overlook it? > >Apparently one can use the left arrow key to take back moves in the Arena gui. >The gui will then eventually - after it is told that it should start to >calculate - put the engine in force mode and send one or more "undo" 's. In >contrast to "remove", "undo" only takes back one move. > >This doesn't work in WinBoard. You will get the message "position is not >current" if you try. Nothing is send to the engine. Unless it is first put in >analyze mode, perhaps. Haven't tried that yet, as analyze mode is still on the >to do list. >So, I wonder, is Arena doing something here that is not part of the WinBoard >protocol? It works fine with my engine which implements both undo and remove. The thing to note is that the relevant commands are not sent to the engine until the user makes a move or you tell it to "move now". For instance, let's say we are at the starting point. I play e4 and my engine plays Nf4. If I now click the left button on the Arena GUI to set the board back to just e4, the undo command is not sent. If I then make the move e5, it sends force, undo, e5 and go commands and my engine starts up again. This seems completely within the WB spec. Andy.
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