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Subject: Re: Extensible Chess Interface (XCI) : updated draft

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 23:13:59 03/15/05

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On March 15, 2005 at 09:44:58, Michael Yee wrote:

>>I see no way, how a GUI could drive a game analysis (which would include some
>>time control, not infinite) and the engine beeing aware of it (the reason
>>UCI_AnalyseMode was added). Also, who would a back to front analysis look?
>
>Another good catch. Instead of "go infinite", "go analyze maxdepth ... maxtime
>..." would be more general.

Perhaps. Or a global state flag: From now on everything is analysis not a real
game. BTW. YOu need such a flag also for pondering. The engine should know, if
it plays a game with pondering or without pondering, so that it can adjust its
time allocation (if it wants to).

>The idea of supporting backwards analysis (or even standard analysis and other
>things unrelated to playing an actual game) is very interesting. Here is an
>idea:
>
>For game-related operations (e.g., backwards analysis on the current game), we
>could have options/commands (similar to Clear Hash) that permit a generalized
>form of output. For example,
>
>option name "Backwards Analysis" type button output
>
>would mean that if the user clicks on "Backwards Analysis", yace would analyze
>the current game, then send generic info strings to the GUI terminated by a
>readyok command:

No. Already today, GUIs "drive" analysis of whole games. Typically, they start
from back to front (because this way, you can get better analysis in the same
time). UCI would send the position before the last game move, then start a
normal search command (with some time control). When the suggested move is
different from the search move, it could send the same position again, remember
the depth of the other analysis and now send a search command with fixed depth
and the game move as the only allowed move (via searchmoves). If it looks
considerably worse (user settable of course) it will give some annotation in the
game score. Now it will send the position on half move (or one move) before, ...

Now you don't have undo. For UCI the long move list was complained against (for
me this is no issue). With your protocol, without undo, you end up sending the
double amount of chars to the engine for each move for a backwards analysis.
Perhaps you will need an undo.

But all this make the protocol (a bit) more difficult to implement than UCI
(learning should be easier, though).

Regards,
Dieter



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