Single Comment

Greg Strong:
| The current state of ChessV? 

Hi Greg! Good to see you back here! What would be very interesting to me
is to have a version of ChessV that just plays as a console application
rather than having its own graphical interface. Preferably using WinBoard
protocol, of course, but I would be happy with anything, no matter how
primitive. I wouldn't even mind if the graphical interface stays, as long
as ChessV would also print the move it makes on its standard output, and
reads and accepts a move from its standard input. If it could do those
things, I would be able to write an adapter to run it under WinBoard
against other engines.

Would this be feasible?

| For onething, it doesn't anticipate forced repetition draws in 
| the appropriate way; even if it is winning by quite a margin, 
| it won't break the repetition to save it's advantage.  

I can vouch from my experience with micro-Max that this is extremely
important. It is almost impossible to quantitatively judge performace of
the engine if it can be tricked into rep draws, to the point where very
clear improvements do not affect the score at all.

In uMax I could fix 95% of the problem by recognizing returns to positions
that already occurred before in the game history, and evaluate those at
0.00. That it cannot really plan (or avoid) forced repetitions that occur
entirely in the tree is only a minor problem, as it does not occur too
often that repetitions can be forced.