On-line blitz tourney May

[hgm]

You should not be in force mode. After 'new' the engine should be in 'play black' mode.

[Evert]

You should not be in force mode. After 'new' the engine should be in 'play black' mode.

Yeah, that's what I said. I didn't have a line "force_mode = false" in the code that handles the "new" command (the real line is "in_play = true").

Not sure why that wouldn't always break things though; as far as I can see it should. Will investigate further, but that line is in now.

[hgm]

Well, it seems XBoard is not entirely consistent in its use of protocol here. Sometimes it puts the engine in force mode to send it the white move, and then 'go' to set it playing as black. I never tried to figure out why it does that, and when. (But apparently not in zippy mode.) With GUI book you would have no problem, because the book moves will be received in force mode, and a 'go' is mandatory. Resuming an adjourned game might have worked, because the already played moves are loaded in force mode. (XBoard is not smart enough to see there is only one (white) move, and make an exception for that.)

[Evert]

Well, it seems XBoard is not entirely consistent in its use of protocol here. Sometimes it puts the engine in force mode to send it the white move, and then 'go' to set it playing as black. I never tried to figure out why it does that, and when. (But apparently not in zippy mode.) With GUI book you would have no problem, because the book moves will be received in force mode, and a 'go' is mandatory. Resuming an adjourned game might have worked, because the already played moves are loaded in force mode. (XBoard is not smart enough to see there is only one (white) move, and make an exception for that.)

Resuming an adjourned game definitely worked (except when I got bitten by the other bug I had, which could cause an endless loop while going through the moves listed in the opening book). Hopefully it's all fixed now though, but I guess we'll find out for sure in a month or so...

Still, I don't understand why this apparently didn't cause a problem in every single game... I'll run the program through valgrind (again) to make sure I'm not doing any out-of-bound access that can (as a side effect) switch off force mode.

[hgm]

It should only cause problems when you play black.