TalkChess.com

H.G.Muller · Joined: 10 Mar 2006 Posts: 12774 Location: Amsterdam

I think the beta version already does this. If you throw a double-clicked King off the board vertically, it excludes all moves, but when you through it over the side edges, it includes all moves again. Probably I will have to find something better for this, because it feels quite unnatural. And the double-clicking when throwing the King off-board is also not really necessary, (and I consistently forget it).

What I really want is to have an extra header line in the Engine-Output window, containing some relevant moves, on which you can then right-click to include or exclude them. This then also would have an 'all', 'next-best' and 'best-only' in it, and perhaps 'tail' to include or exclude all moves not explicitly displayed.

The problem is how to figure out which moves to display there. WinBoard has no idea which moves are good or bad (or even legal, when legality testing is off). So it would have to rely on the engine. It could list moves that have been reported best in any of the previous iterations (occurred as first move in a PV). It could also just start listing a move there that the user excluded, but keep them listed when they are re-included. E.g. print -Nf3 if Nf3 is excluded, and +Nf3 when the user re-includes it, so that the user from that point can include or exclude it just by clicking on the move. This would also give the user some overview over what is currently excluded. If he would click 'next-best', the first move of the last-received PV would be excluded, and it would get listed as such if it was not yet in the list. Clicking 'best-only' would switch any explicitly listed moves (except the current best) off, and +tail to -tail, to indicate everything is off.

I don't mind if WinBoard would now and then re-order the moves in that line, but I don't want the line to change 'asynchronously' (because a new engine PV gets in), because the user might just be clicking it at that time. So a new make-up of the header line would be only allowed in reaction to the user doing something.