TheAnnotateDialog

Annotating a game

The Add variation button ( or )in the analysis window adds the current score and best line of play as a new variation in the game.

You can do this automatically for a number of moves (annotating the game) by pressing the Annotate button, . Besides, the engines best lines also Informant style evaluation symbols are added in this process. First, the parameters for automatic annotations have to be set:
Set the time between moves in seconds: this gives the time, the engine can spend on analysis before moving on to the next move.
Add variations: here, one has the choice if moves for both sides or only one color should be added, if all moves should get an annotation or only if the game move is not the best move according to the engines evaluation. Additionally, one can add an annotation only if the game move is a blunder. The threshold defines the drop of the evaluation necessary to signify a blunder, the number is given in units of pawns (i.e. 0.2 means that if the evaluation drops by more than 2 centi pawns, the game move is a blunder).
Annotate variations will include variations within the game in the analysis by the engine.
Short annotations will only add minimal annotations, that is the pure lines and NAG codes without the engines names and usually without the current scores.
Add score to annotations will add the engines evaluation in pawn units to the annotations. This information can be used later on to draw a Score Graph of the game as a visualisation of the positions reached.
Add annotator tag will add an "Annotator" tag to the game header. This is meant for the Short annotations mode which does not signify which engine was used to gain the current evaluations and lines.
Use book allows the specification of an opening book. Moves that are contained in this opening book are skipped in the annotation process, that is the annotation starts automatically in the middle game.
Annotate several games Scid will first annotate the current game with the settings specified, store the results, then automatically load the next game and annotate that as well. This is repeated till the game loaded reaches the number given in the spin box. By this procedure, many games can be annotated automatically without any user intervention.
Find opening errors will check the opening phase up to the move specified for blunders. Additionally, the Annotator-tag gets an entry "opBlunder X" where X is the move the blunder occurred.
Mark tactical exercises This can be used to generate exercises for the training function Find best move. This option is only available for UCI engines.
After pressing the Ok button, autoplay mode is enabled and the engine starts to analyse the game. When autoplay mode is used and the analysis window is open, a variation containing the score and best line of play is automatically added for each position as autoplay mode moves through the game. Only positions from the current position until the end of the game (or until you exit autoplay mode) are annotated, so you can skip annotation of opening moves by moving to a middlegame position before starting autoplay.

To cancel annotation at any time, just turn off autoplay mode, for example by pressing the Escape key in the main window.

Note that for simplicity, the Annotate button is only available in the window opened as analysis engine 1. If you open an engine as analysis engine 2, you cannot use it to annotate the game.

[Rafał Chojnacki]

What would be super valuable is to have 'max depth' option so a user can limit search not only by time (time per move per sec) but also by max depth. Such an option is supported for example by chess.com, Scid vs. PC.