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Subject: Re: EPD and the real world

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 19:53:54 10/05/05

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On October 05, 2005 at 22:38:42, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>If I recall correctly, EPD was a standard invented by John Stanback and promoted
>by Steven J Edwards.  Stanback used it to communicate moves back and forth
>between programs via a text file.  Edwards apparently had an aggressive plan to
>extend this via a suite of weirdly named utilities that I had never heard of
>before, so I expect they never were written.
>
>These days, EPD is used to store test suites.
>
>Some of the EPD operands appear to suggest the idea that you will run the EPD
>through your program, and out the other end will pop another EPD, which has a
>bunch of fields filled in that can be used to calculate and interpret results.

Try crafty's EPD commands.

Available EPD glue command list
-------------------------------
epdapgn: Append PGN game to <file>
epdbfix: Fix <file1> data for Bookup input <file2>
epdcert: Display certain score for the current position
epdcics: Slave to ICS at <hostname> and <portnumber>
epdcomm: Slave to Duplex using <pipefile-basename>
epddpgn: Display game using PGN
epddsml: Display SAN move list
epddstr: Display PGN Seven Tag Roster
epddtpv: Display PGN tag pair <tag-name> value
epdenum: Enumerate to <depth> from <file1> to <file2>
epdhelp: Display EPD glue command descriptions
epdlink: Slave to Argus at <hostname> and <portnumber>
epdlpgn: Load PGN game from <file>
epdlrec: Load EPD record from <file> <line-number>
epdmore: Display more help for <command>
epdnoop: No operation
epdpfdn: Normalize EPD data from <file1> to <file2>
epdpfdr: Repair EPD data from <file1> to <file2>
epdpfga: Analyze EPD data from <file1> to <file2>
epdpflc: Locate mating cooks in result <file>
epdpfop: Purge EPD <opcode> from <file1> to <file2>
epdscor: Score benchmark EPD results from <file>
epdshow: Show EPD four fields for the current position
epdspgn: Save PGN game to <file>
epdstpv: Set PGN tag pair <tag-name> to <value>
epdtest: EPD glue developer testing

>Does anyone use these fields?

Yes.  Besides crafty, some other programs that know about EPD fields [and that I
use for that purpose] are Chest, Shredder, Hiarcs, Rebel.

The ChessAssistant database program has a nice interface for processing EPD data
with a wide variety of chess engines that do not themselves support EPD and
still producing valid EPD output.  It is found under menu item "Engines" and
menu selection "Test Suites".  In that way I can use (for instance) Chess Tiger
to analyze a set of positions and output the analysis as EPD records.

Bookup knows how to read all of the EPD fields.
Rebel knows how to read all of the EPD fields.
Hiarcs knows how to read all of the EPD fields.

ChessBase can read (but not write) EPD records.  I do not know how many of the
EPD fields that ChessBase recognizes.

There are other amateur chess engines that recognize many EPD fields.

>Does anyone in practical reality ever use the
>fields other than "am" (avoid move), "bm" (best move), "id" (a title), and maybe
>"hmvc" and "fmvn", which are the two fields of the FEN that don't appear in the
>EPD?

Absolutely crucial are:

ce (centipawn evaluation)
acd (depth in plies -- not documented in the standard).  Called 'dep' by Hiarcs.
pm (predicted move)

Very important are:
acn (approximate node count)
acs (approximate seconds)
pv (predicted variation)
are all important to me.

I also use c0 and c1.

Of those above, the absolute necessity fields are ce, acd and pm (can't live
without them).

>My guess is that all of the opcodes are dead except for these five.

Nope.  Not for me anyway.

>Anyone else have a contradictory opinion?
>
>bruce



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