Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Is it time for the Winboard Protocol to go the way of the Dodo?

Author: Lance Perkins

Date: 10:56:32 03/09/05

Go up one level in this thread


Not meaning to be disrespectful to the authors of the UCI protocol, but I think
they need to take courses in protocol design and UI design.

UCI is a mess. Eventhough it came out many years after the WB protocol, they
seem to have not learned from it.

The UCI protocol pretends to be stateless, when in fact it is. So, what is it
really?

The UI knows what the board state is. The engines too know what the board state
is, and yet the UI sends the entire move list to the engine. In comparison, WB
and ICS are very natural. Both sides know the state, each side just has to send
the next move. Now immagine if ICS were like UCI - yikes!

Marrying the UI and the protocol? Now that's a hack. How would you localize
that? It means you have to localize every engine, when you should only be
localizing the UI.

On March 09, 2005 at 12:13:26, Anthony Cozzie wrote:

>After the post on how Daniel Mehrmann is still working on XBoard/Winboard, I
>immediately starting thinking of ways to waste his time.  My question is: Does
>Winboard really have any advantages over UCI any more?
>
>The Anthony WB/UCI comparison:
>
>+UCI:
>
>Interface is cleaner & easier to implement, not being based on the crappy GNU
>chess protocol.
>
>Supports Multiple PVs, refutations, etc.
>
>Graphical configuration of engines.
>
>+WinBoard:
>
>Can operate in text mode.
>
>And this comparison is (obviously) quite favorable to UCI, although I may have
>missed things.  Anyway, I'd be willing to help Daniel out over the next few
>weeks if it meant a new version of Xboard with UCI support, and I'm guessing
>there would be a few other people willing to help out as well.
>
>anthony



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.