Aquarium (other GUIs too?) and WB support => I am shocked

[michiguel]

It does not support WB protocol II?
I just downloaded the Aquarium demo to find out why gaviota had problems, and I see that it supports only WB I. For instance, it does not send protover 2 and tries to edit the position with the obsolete "edit" instead of "setboard".

I do not have any commercial product. Do other commercial GUIs behave like this?
Or is this done on purpose? Is there a list with with GUI <--> protocols they support?

Miguel

[JVMerlino]

Sadly, nobody on the Chessmaster team (after me, of course) saw fit to implement WBII. So, even the most recent version from 2.5 years ago still only supports WBI and DOES use the horrific "edit" command to set up a board.

jm

[Kurt Utzinger]

It does not support WB protocol II?
I just downloaded the Aquarium demo to find out why gaviota had problems, and I see that it supports only WB I. For instance, it does not send protover 2 and tries to edit the position with the obsolete "edit" instead of "setboard".

I do not have any commercial product. Do other commercial GUIs behave like this?
Or is this done on purpose? Is there a list with with GUI <--> protocols they support?

Miguel

It seems that Winboard is considered as being old-fashioned. Most strong
engines are UCI nowadays. If the trend goes on, nobody will in future
develop/use winboard engines.
Kurt

[Matthias Gemuh]

I can understand if a GUI programmer does not implement the WB protocol at all, or if he implements only WB2.
Why implement the very messy WB1 and then skip the rather neat WB2 ?

Matthias.

[Teemu Pudas]

In the case of Aquarium: legacy code from Chess Assistant.

[Eelco de Groot]

I remember from Ed's Pro Deo that to run it in ChessBase it was better to use Odd Gunnar Malin's wb2uci adapter, this became RebelUCI.exe but it was basically the same adapter, than to install it as a Winboard engine. As far as I know Chessbase and Shredder too do not support Winboard 2 at least they did not at that time. I remember trying to install Pro Deo in Shredder as an UCI engine but it did not produce the same results as in Lokasoft, but that was maybe because Lokasoft did not use the analysis mode for UCI engines but ran them in Infinite mode. In Arena people had more success installing Pro Deo as a Winboard engine so for Arena there may be Winboard II but this is just a vague guess. You'd have to ask Michael Diosi or Chris Conkie about that. I don't think there is a list, maybe the Winboard forum would know!

Regards, Eelco

[michiguel]

It does not support WB protocol II?
I just downloaded the Aquarium demo to find out why gaviota had problems, and I see that it supports only WB I. For instance, it does not send protover 2 and tries to edit the position with the obsolete "edit" instead of "setboard".

I do not have any commercial product. Do other commercial GUIs behave like this?
Or is this done on purpose? Is there a list with with GUI <--> protocols they support?

Miguel

I was wrong about Aquarium. I was able to fix the problems with the demo. For some reason, some of the initial messages from Gaviota made Aquarium choke and started to use WB1. Now that I fixed it, it uses WB2, but in a very weird way. It sends '?' (move now) to stop the engine and made it move. Sounds like it does not allow the engine to have its own time management?

In addition, despite gaviota sends feature colors=0 it insist to use the command 'black'. I do not understand the purpose of it.

Miguel

[bob]

It does not support WB protocol II?
I just downloaded the Aquarium demo to find out why gaviota had problems, and I see that it supports only WB I. For instance, it does not send protover 2 and tries to edit the position with the obsolete "edit" instead of "setboard".

I do not have any commercial product. Do other commercial GUIs behave like this?
Or is this done on purpose? Is there a list with with GUI <--> protocols they support?

Miguel

It seems that Winboard is considered as being old-fashioned. Most strong
engines are UCI nowadays. If the trend goes on, nobody will in future
develop/use winboard engines.
Kurt

Nobody in their right mind will develop UCI programs. The winboard protocol is certainly "old fashioned" since it has been around for 20 years. It is _still_ superior to UCI, however.

[mhalstern]

Aquarium is very bad at detecting the type of Engine. Remove the engine - re-add and force winboard, instead of auto detect.

See if this works better.

[Aaron Becker]

It does not support WB protocol II?
I just downloaded the Aquarium demo to find out why gaviota had problems, and I see that it supports only WB I. For instance, it does not send protover 2 and tries to edit the position with the obsolete "edit" instead of "setboard".

I do not have any commercial product. Do other commercial GUIs behave like this?
Or is this done on purpose? Is there a list with with GUI <--> protocols they support?

Miguel

It seems that Winboard is considered as being old-fashioned. Most strong
engines are UCI nowadays. If the trend goes on, nobody will in future
develop/use winboard engines.
Kurt

Nobody in their right mind will develop UCI programs. The winboard protocol is certainly "old fashioned" since it has been around for 20 years. It is _still_ superior to UCI, however.

Good point. We UCI programmers are either idiots or insane, no one knows which (maybe some of us are both). Fortunately there are still plenty of Winboard programmers to move the state of the art in computer chess forward.