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Subject: Re: pondering, draw/resign, and move lists (oh my!)

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 22:26:09 03/15/05

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On March 15, 2005 at 08:39:00, Michael Yee wrote:

>The way I envisioned pondering was this way:
>
>- engine remembers "official" state of its internal board
>- engine can temporarily make a predicted move
>- engine outputs regular thinking lines where the first move in the pv is always
>the pondermove
>- when engine gets next move command, it can decide for itself whether it
>predicted correctly, etc.
>
>This approach seems pretty general (and doesn't add any new commands), e.g., an
>engine can change its ponder move and alert the gui.
>
>An alternative solution would be to have a special style of "info" used during
>pondering, e.g.,
>
>info pondermove move ...

Please show an example with the communication for 2 move or so in a ponder game
(without info). In your state diagram, there is only stop during ponder. So when
does the move come - after stop. This would not be good, I think, because
engines will want to think on in case of correctly predicted ponder move
(depending on used time etc. of course). Actually the UCI pondering looks very
elegant and easy, and probably will fit to over 90% of the engines. Seems that
this cannot be done with a more general ponder model. In this case really move
input would be needed during search. Perhaps even more, making the engine side
considerably more difficult.

You could use both models. An engine that likes the normal pondering could send
bestmove pondermove. If only bestmove is sent, more general pondering is
requested. But does not look elegant.

I don't understand the database discussion: if it has anything to do with the
engine/GUI communication I would strongly suggest to resist including such
things.

The translation suggestion seemed not bad. But it would mean, that the GUI
author knows the engine already, and its internal parameters, so that he can do
the translation. Or the engine author has to deliver some (GUI-specific?)
translation data. How else could a new engine start. Therfore one should make
sure, that the default communicated options are understandable already, without
any translation process. What I mean is, instead of an option name PS (the
author might think this will be translated anyway, sa to pruning style) names
that speak for themselves should be used. Which of course gives the quoting
problem, when multi word names are allowed (which are easier). I personally do
not like those quoting mechanisms too much. But Tord is of course right, in
pointing out, that in the UCI spec it can be considered broken (although in
practice, it is not too bad).

Recently I wanted to search for the two characters \" (with grep) inside PGN
files (Many PGN files have wrong tags with escaped quoting). I don't want to
remember what I had to type on the command line (could depend on the shell,
too).

Regards,
Dieter



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