UCI is precisely to be read by machines, not humans. Consider yourself lucky the interface doesn’t send hex codes instead of move coordinates.Dann Corbit wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 4:05 amI agree with this. SAN is the easiest thing for humans to understand, and comes very naturally. And I was reading chess books before it came common place, so I did not grow up on it.bob wrote: ↑Tue May 26, 2020 3:13 am Personally, I am a fan of SAN and always have been. It's the way things are written in chess books, game scores by humans, etc. It reads much more naturally to me (as a human). I didn't find it difficult to parse although a move generator is needed. It is needed in a chess engine anyway, so that is not exactly a reason to not use it.
The notation used by UCI is nice for machines but much harder for me to read and visualize.
To me, the coordinate notation of UCI makes sense for engines, but not for display to people. Whenever something is emitted and intended for human consumption, it should be SAN.
There’s no reason, btw, that the gui you use to view engine best line chatter can’t convert to SAN and output that.
I guess what you may be thinking is why engines can’t communicate by SAN, well, they could, but the scope for ambiguity and consequent bugs would be high. Inter-engine communication should in general be as simple as possible.