[Scidvspc-users] Xboard tournament improvements

[Steven <ste...@ya...>]

Does anyone still mess with Xboard engines ?
They're not as strong as the modern UCI engines.

I've made a couple of improvements to the tournament 
feature and some xboard engines should behave much better.
Changes are in subversion.

cheers, Steven

The technical details are -

The Xboard protocol is a little harder to grasp than UCI,
and it turns out i had a serious inaccuracy in the
order of the time and move commands.
I issued move/times, when the expected order is
times/move. (UCI gets around this issue by issuing 
the move/times commands altogether in the one line).

The other interesting bug relates to draw and resign 
declarations. Xboard engines are very *cute*. They can 
resign, and also declare draws for insufficient material, 
etc. (UCI engines generally rely on the GUI to do these 
things). But the problem was they did so immediately after 
making a move.

  Engine: move h6h7
  Engine: 1-0 {Black resigns}

I hadn't examined this closely before, and it screwed up the
control mechanism. (The opposing player is told to make a move,
but since the game becomes finished in the meantime, his move
is never processed, causing a vwait to hang forever).

Anyway - i'm enjoying seeing some of these obscure engines play properly now :)

Scid vs. PC (1 minute + 0 seconds)
?, 2012.03.05
              Score        1    2    3
---------------------------------------
 1: Gully    5.0 /  8   XXXX 0==1 0111
 2: Sjeng    5.0 /  8   1==0 XXXX 0111
 3: Marvin   2.0 /  8   1000 1000 XXXX
---------------------------------------
12 games: +2 =2 -8