Can WinBoard hide the engine reported by polyglot?

[matematiko]

I am using WinBoard 4.6.2 with polyglot 1.4.67b.

This is my problem, years ago, some of the strongest players in Yahoo decided to be also "funny" and changed the name of the executables, for example: from polyglot.exe to littleduck.exe or winboard232d.exe to whatever.exe.My ICS emulator shouts (upon request) something like this: "Using YaY verion 3.1 with WinBoard + Polyglot" or "Using Yay version 3.1 with WinBoard + Chessbase". But when this strong users change the exes names then you will see shouts like this: "Using YaY 3.1 with WinBoard + littleduck 2.3" And next thing you know you have a legion of people ( of course the legion thingy is an exaggeration on my part ) searching for littleduck 2.3 all over the internet and posting topics in every chess forum looking for the strongest engine in the world named "littleduck 2.3". I found this disgusting and offensive to the creators of polyglot and winboard232d. For this reason in the next version I enforced an executable name string match check, if the pseudo engine was not polyglot or winboard 232d the emulator will terminate itself.

The problem I have now is that WinBoard or polyglot or both are now doing string manipulation and now what my emulator reads from WinBoard is "WinBoard + Houdini 2.0 pro x64", since my emulator does not see the word "polyglot" or "winboard232d" it exists automatically.

I am having a deja-vu felling that I asked this before, but a search revealed no answers. Is there a way for WinBoard/polyglot to either include itself in the string? For example: Winboard + polyglot + HoudiniXXXX" or remove the engine name and report just as" WinBoard + polyglot"?

Best regards and thanks,

[H.G.Muller]

I see the question for the first time. But WinBoard cannot do this, and I don't think it is really desirable it could. "WinBoard + Houdini 2.0 pro x64" is the correct way it should be reported to the ICS; "WinBoard + polyglot" is non-info. And it would not work for WB engines anyway, as they would not use polyglot. It seems like a bad bug in the ICS simulator when it crashes on using a WB engine! That every bit of information you report can be abused by jokers substituting the information is unavoidable, but IMO no reason for stopping to provide any information at all.

If you don't want other ICS users to see what engine is being used, out of fear that people might lie about it, the logical place to do it would be in your ICS simulator. Terminating the simulator is needlessly aggressive anyway; you can simply have it substitute back the 'polyglot' when it detects something else.

[matematiko]

I do agree with everything you said Mr. Muller, but the question remains, when using polyglot as UCI adapter, can WinBoard keep the "polyglot" string and send the "Interface" string as "Winboard + polyglot + Rybka4", after all ,this is the truth.

Best regards,

[H.G.Muller]

Well, it can't, because it is not aware that Polyglot is an adapter. It thinks Polyglot is an engine. And through the 'myname' feature of WB protocol, engines can tell their name to the GUI, and this prevails over the filename (which is only used as a last resort).

So the 'blame' is on Polyglot; basically what you want is a Polyglot that does say to the GUI that it is Polyglot, rather than using the engine name. But I don't think Polyglot can do that. In fact I don't even think you can make Polyglot use the name of the engine file; it uses the name the engine reports in the 'id' command it sends at startup (the UCI equivalent of 'myname'). So 'Little Duck' tricks like you mention should not work at all. At least not by renaming Polyglot or the engine. You really would have to hex-edit the engine to make it print another name. This really is a non-problem.

My policy is to make use of Polyglot fully transparant: the user should not be able to see the difference between WinBoard + Polyglot and a GUI that natively supports UCI. Having Polyglot alter the engine name would wreck that.

UCI2WB seems to behave somewhat like you want, though: it reports its name as "Engine name (UCI2WB)". So perhaps you could use that in stead of Polyglot.

[matematiko]

Thank you Mr. Muller, your precious time answering my questions, is highly appreciated.

I will just deal with what I have and what I want with what I can and found the ways.

Now that the original questions has been settled, it is unclear to me who is the developer of the polyglot fork Michel did work on for a long while. Can you please clarify what is the situation here?

I noticed your latest release includes fonzie's polyglot. Nothing against that one, but it will help to know what are the basis of your choice.

As always, best regards sir.

[H.G.Muller]

The situation is that Michel stopped developing Polyglot, and I put his source-code history in my on-line repository at hgm.nubati.net . The version in the 'learn' branch there is what I distribute with WinBoard. I don't actively develop Polyglot, however. If WB protocol is extended for supporting new features in WinBoard, I add the support for these to Polyglot to make sure the new WB feature is also available for UCI engines. (So far this only occurred for the 'exclude moves' analysis feature.)

[matematiko]

If it is OK with you, I do hope a chess enthusiast/c-c++ guru takes this as an invitation to take over on this particular polyglot's branch. Not that anything is needed or missing, but who knows: A sharp mind might come with good IDEAS.

Have a nice Sunday Mr. Muller.