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Subject: ECO?

Author: Brian McKinley

Date: 15:34:04 01/30/99


I am still new to chess programming and even newer to normal chess programming
My first incarnation only played losers chess. I finally have a version of that
plays normal chess well enough that I want to run it against some test suites.
I downloaded all the suites from
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Launchpad/2640/pgn/tests/index.htm
imported the EPD strings into a database and attempted to parse them into
another table that contained fields for Identifier, FEN, and Best Move(s).  In
so doing I realised that the EPD was not as straight forward as it first
appeared.  The FEN representation is missing the Halfmove and Fullmove.
Although these are not important for these positions I didn't know they were
optional and the code I wrote to parse FEN and set the position expects them.
Some of the strings do not contain a best move.  There were a few that contain
the tag "am" which I assume is an abbreviation for awful move, and the nunntest
contains only "eoc" tags.  I found ECO listings at
http://www.clark.net/pub/pribut/speco.html
but I don't understand how they are interpreted with relation to the positions
in the nunntest.

For instance what does R' represent?
How were the classes determined?
What is the difference between the Main ECO codes and the Full ECO codes?
And finally, what does the acronym "ECO" stand for?

Maybe someone can point me to a documentation with more explanation.  In the
mean time I have 7932 best move positions to keep me busy.

Thanks

Brian McKinley



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