Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 10:52:25 08/17/05
Go up one level in this thread
On August 17, 2005 at 13:01:29, Jorge Pichard wrote:
>Why don't you download Glaurung Mainz and Spike 1.0 and also Arena 1.1 and have
>a real FRC match.
Unfortunately it is not quite as simple as that. Because there is quite
a lot of confusion about this topic, I will try to explain the current
situation regarding FRC GUIs, protocols and engines.
There are three main types of FRC engines: Those which use
the XBoard/Winboard protocol (like AICE, Baron, Betsy, Frenzee
and Hermann), those which use Stefan Meyer-Kahlen's recent
FRC extensions to the UCI protocol (Fruit, Glaurung, Homer,
Shredder) and those which use the older, non-standard UCI FRC
extensions included in Arena (Gothmog, Jonny, Spike, perhaps also
Chispa). I apologise if I made some mistakes in the classification.
For FRC capable GUIs, there are three choices: Shredder,
Arena and XBoard/Winboard (which I from now on will
refer to as simply "Winboard"). These differ in the types of
engines they can run. I will describe each of them below.
Shredder is only compatible with UCI engines which
implement the new, official UCI FRC extensions. At the
moment, I think Glaurung, Homer and Shredder are the
only ones available to the public, but I think there will soon
be several others. About half of the participants in Mainz
used the Shredder GUI.
Arena can use FRC Winboard engines, and UCI engines
using the older, non-standard UCI FRC extensions.
Engines which use the new standard UCI FRC extensions
cannot be used directly, but it should be possible to
run them as Winboard engines in Arena by using the
most recent beta version of PolyGlot (1.4 beta 2).
Nobody has yet confirmed that this works, though.
The standard Winboard does not support FRC at all,
except for games played on a chess server. However,
there are at least two modified versions of Winboard
which can be used: One by Anastasios Milikas, and
another one by Fabien Letouzey and myself. These
modified Winboard versions can run Winboard FRC
engines (of course) and Shredder-style UCI FRC
engines (by using PolyGlot 1.4 beta 2).
Finally, here is an attempt to summarise all this
confusing information in a table. "Y" means that
the combination works, "N" means that it does
not work, and "P" means that it works with
PolyGlot:
| Old UCI | New UCI | Winboard |
---------+---------+---------+----------+
Arena | Y | P? | Y |
---------+---------+---------+----------+
Shredder | N | Y | N |
---------+---------+---------+----------+
Winboard | N | P | Y |
---------+---------+---------+----------+
Tord
This page took 0 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.