Human in Winboard tournament?

[Guenther Simon]

I am not sure, if that already was acchieved in the past, my memory may be false on this.
What I am asking for is a possibility to add an Human player to the engine list, thus he could play
in automated matches/tournaments through the tournament setup option.
This would need a special program/adapter which simulates an engine and then waits for board input,
as if those were its own moves. May be one could already use Inbetween for this, if one knows
what to send, or change in communication to make it work?

The advantage is that one doesn't need to start a new game each time and there is also no need to specify
a start position for each new game, if the goal is to work through a set of positions etc.

Guenther

[H.G.Muller]

I guess this is indeed possible through a pseudo-engine that on the other end communicates to the human. But the question is what form this communication should take. If the user would type WB protocol, it would be pretty trivial, but not very user friendly. If the pseudo-engine would in fact be a driver for a sensory chess board, he could do the moves there, which would be pretty good. If the user wants to enter the moves on a graphical display, the pseudo-engine would have to contain its own GUI. Which duplicates a lot of functionality already there.

Perhaps it would be easier to just use a dummy engine that never moves, but modify WinBoard to not ignore user clicks on the board (as it normally does in match/TwoMachines mode) when the color that engine plays has the move. This option (e.g. /firstHuman or /secondHuman) could then be put with the dummy engine in the engine list.

[Guenther Simon]

I guess this is indeed possible through a pseudo-engine that on the other end communicates to the human. But the question is what form this communication should take. If the user would type WB protocol, it would be pretty trivial, but not very user friendly. If the pseudo-engine would in fact be a driver for a sensory chess board, he could do the moves there, which would be pretty good. If the user wants to enter the moves on a graphical display, the pseudo-engine would have to contain its own GUI. Which duplicates a lot of functionality already there.

Perhaps it would be easier to just use a dummy engine that never moves, but modify WinBoard to not ignore user clicks on the board (as it normally does in match/TwoMachines mode) when the color that engine plays has the move. This option (e.g. /firstHuman or /secondHuman) could then be put with the dummy engine in the engine list.

Yes, the last paragraph seems sensible to me and what I had imagined.

Guenther