WinBoard protocol: memory command

[Zach Wegner]

Indeed. Keep the protocol simple I say.

[Matthias Gemuh]

if an engine wants to use egtb's it should be smart enough to handle them itself and should do its own counting

Amen.

[H.G.Muller]

OK, it seems Ron is clearly outvoted.

For me it is difficut to judge which information would be important for an engine to know (and needlesly cumberome to figure out) in connection with tablebases, as none of my engines has ever used them. Basically I don't want WinBoard to be involved in the specific needs for various formats at all. Those defining the tablebase format should define the protocol with which they should be announced to the engines.

As I pointed out above, the way I will implement the commands can be abused esily to piggyback any information you want onto the path name, separated from it by spaces. Future formats, which must convey really essential information to the engine, can make use of that. Without any need to adapt the WB protocol, by leaving the format of the second and optional later parameters of the egtbpath command explicitly undefined.

[Daniel Shawul]

I am trying to implement these new commands but I have some doubts.

a)Does the final format for the "egtb" command has only the path? That is without
the egtb cache,membory for block indexes, and other internal egtb stuff.
The "memory N" command makes sure that every engine shoud come to the <= N bytes when
loaded. Is that correct?

b)cores N -> Mine can already handle this with another command "mt". But It does so
only outside of search. You mentioned that it should be able to handle it while pondering.
Scorpio stops pondering if it gets any message other than stat commands like "." during pondering.
Is that correct?

Questions from the old protocol:

c) I do not understand the "ping-pong" stuff in Winboard. It is suggested all engines should
implement it?

d) If the engine sends "done 0" at the beginning ,i.e when the pipe is just opened and before "xboard",
"protover" commands are sent, will xboard be able to process it? I need to do this to process
all initialization that might take some time at the beginning.

Daniel

[Tony Thomas]

I have a question for you H.G. Where do you keep the latest version of winboard? 4.3.15 for example.??

[H.G.Muller]

The latest version of the WinBoard executable is available at

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/alpha.tst

Using it is at your own risk, though. I usually test if the features I add are working before I put it there, but not very thoroughly. And not at all if they have unintended side effects in other modes than they were intended for. (Which is always a big risk if you are changing programs that you don't really know.) So occasionally I might put a version there that is badly broken.

[Tony Thomas]

The latest version of the WinBoard executable is available at

http://home.hccnet.nl/h.g.muller/alpha.tst

Using it is at your own risk, though. I usually test if the features I add are working before I put it there, but not very thoroughly. And not at all if they have unintended side effects in other modes than they were intended for. (Which is always a big risk if you are changing programs that you don't really know.) So occasionally I might put a version there that is badly broken.

Thanks... your history of fixing bugs isnt that bad...

[Roger Brown]

I have a question for you H.G. Where do you keep the latest version of winboard? 4.3.15 for example.??

Hello Tony Thomas,

I am somewhat surprised at this post.

I thought you were an unrepentant Arena user?

What are you doing, fooling around with this ancient and backward gui?



Have fun.

Later.

[Daniel Shawul]

Ok I would like to think this post of mine is not being ignored ,and got
buried somehow
For H.G : It would help you take your mind of the bitter posts in the other forum

Daniel

[Kerwin]

I prefer that the definition of the Memory command be a hard limit on the "total" memory usage of an engine. This includes code, static and dynamic tables for board maintenance, evaluation, etc. Defining it this way makes for a fair comparison of engines.

Think of it as the hardware limit itself. E.g., you have two identical machines, each with 1GB of memory, and it is up to the individual engines to make full use of the available memory.

Bitboard engines for example are notorious for large attack tables. Well, too bad for them - that just means that they would have less memory to allocate for transposition table.

[Tony Thomas]

I have a question for you H.G. Where do you keep the latest version of winboard? 4.3.15 for example.??

Hello Tony Thomas,

I am somewhat surprised at this post.

I thought you were an unrepentant Arena user?

What are you doing, fooling around with this ancient and backward gui?



Have fun.

Later.

I have to admit, I am a winboard newbie. I still dont know how to use it with a tournament manager..but so far it is the most reliable GUI I have ever used. I have not experienced any problems with winboard on icc. The only other GUI I have tried on ICC is chesspartner, and sometimes Romi lost communication with it and lost on time if I werent paying attention. Romi does manage time badly when ponder is turned on, but under winboard it never loses on time.