UCI, xboard protocols and interfaces for Mac OS X Lion

[stegemma]

I'm asking myself which protocol implement in my new program: UCI or xboard (or both?) and if there are some interface working in Mac OS X Lion. I see that a lot of programmers use Arena but it seems to me that is only Windows.

I would like to try some automated tournament, to test the program, but using the Mac, not the Windows PC that i'm abandoning.

Any advise?

[Sven]

There are some threads regarding WinBoard for Mac in WinBoard forum, have you seen them? Maybe you can find some interesting information there.

Sven

[Evert]

I'm asking myself which protocol implement in my new program: UCI or xboard (or both?) and if there are some interface working in Mac OS X Lion. I see that a lot of programmers use Arena but it seems to me that is only Windows.

I would like to try some automated tournament, to test the program, but using the Mac, not the Windows PC that i'm abandoning.

Any advise?

I use XBoard, which these days can apparently do tournaments as well. I use a Perl script for that though (and I do most of my testing on Linux rather than my Mac now).

[stegemma]

Thanks, i'm trying xboard for X11 on my iMac. The installer works fine (is a .pkg) and the X11 system has been runned automatically at first program start (i'm almost new to mac, so i were not sure about that, before trying).

Maybe i pass to the WinBoard forum... for any further needing.

[Roger Brown]

I'm asking myself which protocol implement in my new program: UCI or xboard (or both?) and if there are some interface working in Mac OS X Lion. I see that a lot of programmers use Arena but it seems to me that is only Windows.

I would like to try some automated tournament, to test the program, but using the Mac, not the Windows PC that i'm abandoning.

Any advise?

Hello Stefano,

There is an Xboard for the Mac with a bewildering array of features for engine tournaments, settings etc.

With the refinements and features implemented in Winboard/Xboard it hardly matters which protocol your engine eventually suppports as Xboard handles both - Xboard protocol natively and UCI through Polyglot.

The Polyglot handling is transparent to the user so the engine settings etc are done in the gui without the user seeming to interact with Polyglot at all.

Try Xboard for the Mac. You will not regret it.

Later.

[ilari]

Hello Stefano,

There is an Xboard for the Mac with a bewildering array of features for engine tournaments, settings etc.

With the refinements and features implemented in Winboard/Xboard it hardly matters which protocol your engine eventually suppports as Xboard handles both - Xboard protocol natively and UCI through Polyglot.

The Polyglot handling is transparent to the user so the engine settings etc are done in the gui without the user seeming to interact with Polyglot at all.

Try Xboard for the Mac. You will not regret it.

Later.

Nice marketing speech
But yes, there's not much else one can recommend for Mac OS than Winboard. I think it's the only free GUI that handles tournaments, and both major communication protocols.

With that said, Cute Chess is shaping up to be pretty nice on a Mac:


Once I get tournament support and some GUI polish finished it's going to be good enough for those who like to tinker with bleeding edge stuff.

[hgm]

When you get to implementing Swiss, note that in XBoard I delegated making the Swiss pairing to an external 'pairing engine'. XBoard just sends the results of all prior games to the engine as a string of + = - , and the number of a game, and then receives the pairing (e.g. "3-7") for that game back.

Other GUIs could use such a pairing engine too, so they don't have to bother with the nitty-gritty details of Swiss. And the hope is that eventually a pairing engine will be available that implements Swiss "by the book", rather than all the different approximations the various GUIs are using now because the real thing is too complex.

[stegemma]

I'm lost with xboard configuration... this "cute chess" look pretty, does it is freely available?

[ilari]

Oh, there's no danger of me implementing Swiss tournaments anytime soon, there's just going to be single-elimination and round-robin at first. If I some day decide that Swiss tournaments are needed, I'll probably try to find a library for that, or convert your pairing engine to one.

[ilari]

I'm lost with xboard configuration... this "cute chess" look pretty, does it is freely available?

Well, it's definitely free (licensed under the GPL). And it's available in the sense that you can grab a DMG installer here (for 64-bit Intel Macs only): http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/bin/cutechess.dmg
But it's not a released product, just a testing snapshot that may contain bugs and lacks some important features like tournaments.