[Other] Frustration

After 5 hours of tweaking and crying and screaming I finally got both the UCI and WinBoard modes to work.

Programming errors mixed with logical errors and lack of knowledge, together with WinBoard acting like a prick. It was not a fun 5 hours. :)

And to top it off blogspot refuses to work with Firefox tonight for some reason.

Anyway, as I suspected the problem with Machine vs. Machine in WinBoard was due to the lack of the force command. It is now implemented.

I also noticed a bug in the line I used to install Mediocre in winboard.ini. My line looked like this:

"java Mediocre x" /fd="[path]"

This allows spaces in the path. But the /fd command seems to ruin the paths to the other engines in the list.

The easiest way to put a Java engine in the winboard.ini is to use:

"java -classpath [path] Mediocre x"

But if you have spaces in the path (like I do) you can not write it like that since any quotation marks will ruin the command.

If anyone have any idea how to write that line so it works with spaces in the path, please let me know.

Both the UCI and WinBoard mode now works with setting up positions, playing black and white, and playing Machine vs. Machine matches, in both Arena and WinBoard (and hopefully in any other GUI). They also send thinking output.

What does not work is things like analyze mode, move now, ponder, or any kind of settings sent from the GUI, like search depth or move time.

I find these less important at the moment.

I have also been working on a command line interface which will be mainly used for testing, like perft, divide and test suites. I do not intend to make it possible to play from the command line, that is what we have interfaces for.

Now it is time to move on to working on the actual engine.