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Subject: Re: S9 Book

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 08:57:18 02/17/05

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On February 17, 2005 at 10:06:16, Peter Skinner wrote:

>On February 17, 2005 at 06:44:44, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>Please explain why you think that Shredder UCI is the one with the limited
>>functionality ?
>>
>>Tony
>
>It's not the one with limited functionality. In fact your able to use it in more
>interfaces.
>
>The problem is that you _don't_ get to use the proper book for it anywhere.
>
>With UCI it is supposed to be the "Universal" interface, yet the author of the
>standard limits the usage in his own engine. I just don't get it.

The UCI design clearly puts the interface in control of quite a few things. Book
handling was one of them. By design UCI didn't provide for book usage outside
the GUI. The *possibility* to do so with "ownbook" was added afterwards, as I
understand it. There are some additional issues with learning that must be
dealth with when you use ownbook. Most people never seem to have gotten that
correct, and as a result there's now "ucinewgame". "Ownbook" has many more
limitations related to the GUI interaction and is basically an ugly hack.

If you want own book access outside the native GUI, you must duplicate all book
code from the GUI into the engine. Or do all book handling natively, but then
the GUI can't have a nice book editor and so on. Or put all book handling code
in a DLL which both engine and GUI can access.

Either solution is quite a bit of extra work.

So please, stop asking yourself why Shredder, as the first UCI engine, doesn't
support "ownbook". The protocol was never intended to support that concept in
the first place. If it was, I'm sure the workings of it would be about 100000x
better than they are now.

--
GCP



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