no more ChessGUI

[JoshPettus]

BTW HGM I did find this page with all the key words for describing the font.

It doesn't look there are that many

http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2reference/cl ... ption.html

[Teemu Pudas]

Chess960 support in Arena was broken ? No ! That approach was simply the standard before SMK appeared on the scene with his own new approach .

Nope, it's broken even now. X-FEN includes Shredder-FEN as a special case (for when the rook to be castled with is not the left/rightmost rook, making KQkq notation ambiguous). Arena 3.5.1 uses KQkq all the time:

[FEN "nrbkqrnb/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/NRBKQRNB w KQkq - 0 1"]

1. f4 d5 2. Nb3 h6 3. Rf3 f6 4. Nc5 c6 5. a4 b6 6. Ra3 b5 7. Raa1 Rb6 *

Copy EPD:
[d]n1bkqrnb/p3p1p1/1rp2p1p/1pNp4/P4P2/8/1PPPP1PP/RRBKQ1NB w Qk - 2 8
Incorrect castling rights. Also, when I paste this back in, the castling rights sometimes disappear completely.

(Sure this is not specific to UCI, or even to engines, but that's not the part you bolded).

[Matthias Gemuh]

Chess960 support in Arena was broken ? No ! That approach was simply the standard before SMK appeared on the scene with his own new approach .

Nope, it's broken even now. X-FEN includes Shredder-FEN as a special case (for when the rook to be castled with is not the left/rightmost rook, making KQkq notation ambiguous). Arena 3.5.1 uses KQkq all the time:

....

If I remember well, the Arena-UCI-Castling is with "O-O" and SMK-Castling is not a special case of that. It has nothing to do with X-FEN.

[hgm]

FEN handling is just an independent way in which Arena is broken for Chess960. In fact it is more fundamentally broken than for castling, where it just uses another standard. For FENs it is dead wrong, and no amount of standard changing could make it work. This doesn't only affects UCI, but also WB engines. Fortunately it gets away with it for all 960 initial positions.

Bacically UCI does not exist. There is Arena Chess Interface, and there is Shredder Chess Interface, and there is nothing Universal about them apart from the name...

[Alexander Schmidt]

I am surprised to hear that, as no one ever complained about this before. On the contrary, even I was aware (although I never use Arena, and although I never play Chess960) that Chess960 support in Arena was broken,

I am sure we talked about that. You don't want to support an ancient standard set by the Arena team and engine authors for the first UCI/Chess960 engines, that's fine. SMK set a new standard for his protocol without cooperating with the Arena team, that's fine as well. The Arena team don't want to support the new standard introduced by SMK that's also fine. Matthias made the effort to support everything out there, that's just great

[Modern Times]

. Matthias made the effort to support everything out there, that's just great

Yes, which is what I said at the beginning It is a one-stop-shop for chess960 matches.

I value it for other things too - very flexible adjudication options, and for repeating time controls you can set minutes and seconds e.g. 40 moves in 2 min 30 secs. Neither of which Stefan's Shredder GUI can do.

[supersharp77]

Hello Folks,
I have retired from chess programming and have deleted the source code of my engines and of ChessGUI. I therefore do not recommend the further use of ChessGUI because no support would be available from me. I may delete the ChessGUI website soon.

Cheers,
Matthias.

Sorry to hear the bad news Matthias.........Taktix is one of my favorite chess engines and Big Lion was featured in one of my earliest chess engine tourneys.....lots of work have you put into your chess endeavors.....best wishes in your future projects/retirement.....enjoy!!

AR

[hgm]

I am sure we talked about that. You don't want to support an ancient standard set by the Arena team and engine authors for the first UCI/Chess960 engines, that's fine.

I think you are mixing up the FEN problem (WB engines) with the castling problem now (UCI engines). There never was any need for me to support anything w.r.t. the latter, as Polyglot handles UCI engines for me. I was not even aware until your posting that there exist engines that require OO castling; people always explained the problem to me as that UCI engines do not understand Arena's O-O, but require Shredder's KxR notation. Well, that is what Polyglot supports too, so I was under the impression that everything was fine. What you tell me now is that Polyglot needs an OOcastling work-around option for these engine (which it does not seem to have, as I just checked).

As to the FEN problem, I was aware that some older WB engines did not understand neither Shredder FEN or X-FEN, but require the castling field to be always KQkq, no matter where the Rooks are. I added a work-around option for that in WinBoard long ago, where the user could force the castling field in FENs sent to an engine to by whatever the engine would need.

SMK set a new standard for his protocol without cooperating with the Arena team, that's fine as well. The Arena team don't want to support the new standard introduced by SMK that's also fine.

No, that is not fine. It is stubborn and detrimental. They obviously lost that battle, and get stuck in the stone age by not adapting to present-day reality.

Matthias made the effort to support everything out there, that's just great

Well, I have some reservations about that: Although I agree that it is important to always maintain backward compatibility with obsolete standards, I think it sends a bad signal to be too forthcoming in this respect. It is very important to make sure everyone will be kept aware of what is deprecated and what is correct. Otherwise novices to the game will mistakenly think that 'anything flies', and will continue to produce non-compliant software (in this case engines), that might work on some interfaces, but not on others (e.g. Shredder). In the end everyone will suffer from this.

So I consider actions that encourage deteroriation of standards highly immoral.

[Matthias Gemuh]

...

So I consider actions that encourage deteroriation of standards highly immoral.

"deterioration of standards" makes no sense here because Arena was a Chess960-UCI pioneer that set a standard at a time when no other standard existed to deteriorate.
Engines from that era still deserve to be supported on the GUI side.

[rabbits23]

Nice to see that you've still got a sense of humor Matthias.
Al