I sent Tom Kerrigan an email asking permission to "work" a little bit on a version of his TSCP, but got no answer. Does anyone knows if he still answers ?
Just want to "work" on eval, don't know anything in programming and will need cooperation for coding
At the end, the little engine would be not only Open Source but cooperative patchwork
I contacted Tom some time ago (maybe 4-6 months) and he kindly answered my email.
Regards
E Diaz
Two first meanings of the dutch word "leren":
1. leren [vc] (learn, larn, acquire) acquire or gain knowledge or skills.
2. leren [v] (teach, learn, instruct) impart skills or knowledge to.
I reported recently that Winboard protocol support is broken in TSCP, when running matches, and I haven't had an answer (so far).
FYI the gist of the problem is this:
TSCP (1.81) can send an extra move after game end, which causes Winboard to pop up an error dialog and abort the next game. This occurs if the other side has resigned or if Winboard has adjudicated the game (in case of being checkmated or stalemated, TSCP has no moves so it won't send one).
The root cause of this appears to be that TSCP doesn't monitor input while searching, or before sending a move, but only afterwards.
Arasan now starts an input polling thread and this runs asynchronously with the search. When the search is running, commands such as "quit" or "result" get pushed onto a stack and the terminate flag is set. When the search completes, it first looks into the stack to see if a game ending command is present, and if so it does not send the move. Then it executes the pending commands in the stack before reading any new ones.
This is not actually much code and if implemented would have the side benefit of enabling TSCP to easily support ponder, which it doesn't, currently.
The easiest way to solve this problem is to support ping. Then XBoard can see whether engine output belongs to the current game or the previous one.
It doesn't help for pondering, but PeekNamedPipe (for Windows) has always served me well for that, in single-threaded engines. It makes for nice unity in the engine: when thinking, you poll for the cock, when pondering you poll for input.
Well, actually 'open source' does mean access to the source code. It seems some people are now trying to hijack that terminology for there own purposes. Best ignore them...
