I would even say the lack of promotion. As the promoted piece is not displayed when played, some chess interfaces (cutechess-cli, for example) consider the move illegal and give the game to the opponent. micromax is unfortunately almost impossible to use into any tournament manager.
Engine programming
Moderators: hgm, Rebel, chrisw
-
- Posts: 434
- Joined: Fri Dec 16, 2016 11:04 am
- Location: France
- Full name: Richard Delorme
Re: Engine programming
Richard Delorme
-
- Posts: 28123
- Joined: Fri Mar 10, 2006 10:06 am
- Location: Amsterdam
- Full name: H G Muller
Re: Engine programming
Oh, you are right! And the amazing thing is that you are the first one to ever complain about this.
This is completely unintentional. The micro-Max code I showed here, and on which the character count is done for determining Elo/char, is a stand-alone program, and doesn't print any moves at all: it shows what it played through printing a board diagram of the new position. And after a promotion the piece will certainly be shown as a Queen.
So it is just a consequence of an oversight in the WB-protocol driver that I fused to the stand-alone version to make automated testing against other engines (by me and by CCRL) possible. I always test under WinBoard, and this is very forgiving towards the format of the input move. If no promotion character is present in a Pawn move to the last rank, it defaults to promotion to Queen.
So WinBoard definitely is one tournament manager for which playing micro-Max is no problem at all, which is why I never noticed the non-compliant promotion move.
I wonder how CCRL managed to test micro-Max without ever running into this problem. I cannot imagine they only use WinBoard.
BTW, Fairy-Max doesn't suffer from this problem, and Fairy-Max 4.8 should be functionally equivalent to micro-Max 4.8. I think I fixed that for the benefit of engine-defined chess variants, for which WinBoard would have no idea what the default promotion piece should be. (The Queen might not even participate.)
This is completely unintentional. The micro-Max code I showed here, and on which the character count is done for determining Elo/char, is a stand-alone program, and doesn't print any moves at all: it shows what it played through printing a board diagram of the new position. And after a promotion the piece will certainly be shown as a Queen.
So it is just a consequence of an oversight in the WB-protocol driver that I fused to the stand-alone version to make automated testing against other engines (by me and by CCRL) possible. I always test under WinBoard, and this is very forgiving towards the format of the input move. If no promotion character is present in a Pawn move to the last rank, it defaults to promotion to Queen.
So WinBoard definitely is one tournament manager for which playing micro-Max is no problem at all, which is why I never noticed the non-compliant promotion move.
I wonder how CCRL managed to test micro-Max without ever running into this problem. I cannot imagine they only use WinBoard.
BTW, Fairy-Max doesn't suffer from this problem, and Fairy-Max 4.8 should be functionally equivalent to micro-Max 4.8. I think I fixed that for the benefit of engine-defined chess variants, for which WinBoard would have no idea what the default promotion piece should be. (The Queen might not even participate.)
-
- Posts: 3196
- Joined: Fri May 26, 2006 3:00 am
- Location: WY, USA
- Full name: Michael Sherwin
Re: Engine programming
HI Daniel, If you still have that basic code you can compile it in QB64. It is supposed to be QB4.5 backwards compatible and compiles to C++ and then using MINGW compiles to a native exe. Just one note about speed-- DO loops run faster than for loops or while loops in QB64. It would be interesting to know how much faster it is.Daniel Anulliero wrote: ↑Sat Mar 14, 2020 10:30 pm I wrote my first chess program with QuickBasic 4.5 long time ago : very weak, very slow
Then I switched to C , my préférence.
As bob wrote : it is your personnal choice ,
If you are on a sidewalk and the covid goes beep beep
Just step aside or you might have a bit of heat
Covid covid runs through the town all day
Can the people ever change their ways
Sherwin the covid's after you
Sherwin if it catches you you're through
Just step aside or you might have a bit of heat
Covid covid runs through the town all day
Can the people ever change their ways
Sherwin the covid's after you
Sherwin if it catches you you're through