Chess ics

Author

ics

Moonlit

2006-08-10, 7:35 pm

Hi,

Anyone willing to answer a few questions ( I am a bit confused about the
protocol(s) most chess engines use).

I am writing a chess program and would also like to add the ability to hook
up other chess engines to my GUI (apart from the one I am supplying myself).
Currently it can play very simple games read/write pgn files partly read fen
(working on that) and I created a lot of the interface (but still needs load
of work).

I have hooked up gnuchess to a port on my linux machine using xinetd (my
interface/engine runs on windows though) so I can telnet to it and/or
connect from my program.. I wonder if I make my program able to talk to the
gnuchess server would it also be able to talk to the internet chess server
and or other engines?

Does anyone have a list of the commands a chess server ( for instance fics)
receives/sends?

What would be the most major protocols to support (and is there any
documentation)?

I read an article about xboard/winboard and that most engines support the
'winboard' protocol. Is this actually the same as what gnuchess uses on the
command line?

Your help greatly appreciated
--

Regards, Ron AF Greve

http://moonlit.xs4all.nl

Simon Waters

2006-08-12, 7:33 pm

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:30:39 +0200, Moonlit wrote:

quote:

> I read an article about xboard/winboard and that most engines support the
> 'winboard' protocol. Is this actually the same as what gnuchess uses on the
> command line?

If started with "--xboard" then yes, errors and ommissions excepted.

The Winboard protocol is documented on www.tim-mann.org and in the xboard
source tar ball.

To talk to the chess engines you need extra stuff, but there are
connectors to connect chess engines that already talk winboard.

The other protocol is UCI (Universal Chess Interface).

To be honest these days starting from scratch UCI is probably the more
important to implement.

You should also familiarise yourself with "polyglot" as part of your
background reading.

http://arctrix.com/nas/fruit/

Moonlit

2006-08-13, 7:35 pm

Hi Simon,

Thanks for answering my post and for the link.

I will see if I implement UCI myself or just use the polyglot adaptor (and
save myself a lot of time :-) )

Something different; Looking through the source files I saw that they only
scan for the first six tags of fen.. I have not seen use of the
operator/operands tags anywhere on the web. Does anyone know if and where
they are used?

Regards, Ron AF Greve

http://moonlit.xs4all.nl

"Simon Waters" <20060701@technocool.net> wrote in message
news:44ddfe7c.0@entanet...

quote:

> On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 01:30:39 +0200, Moonlit wrote:
>
>
> If started with "--xboard" then yes, errors and ommissions excepted.
>
> The Winboard protocol is documented on www.tim-mann.org and in the xboard
> source tar ball.
>
> To talk to the chess engines you need extra stuff, but there are
> connectors to connect chess engines that already talk winboard.
>
> The other protocol is UCI (Universal Chess Interface).
>
> To be honest these days starting from scratch UCI is probably the more
> important to implement.
>
> You should also familiarise yourself with "polyglot" as part of your
> background reading.
>
> http://arctrix.com/nas/fruit/