Rich Hutnik wrote on Wed, Oct 8, 2008 03:03 PM UTC:
What I am saying regarding to FEN and FEN's size is:
1. In comparison to using notation that would be used to communicate
moves, it will almost always be larger.
2. An extended version of FEN is going to be needed for all games. I am
no denying its importance. There is a question of whether or not, when
doing communication of changes in game states, when connecting to the
Courier system (or others) whether one only needs to pass a FEN to
accomplish what is needed. Will EVER game on the planet not need to track
moves? There PGN also for recording all moves. Would having something
besides a FEN be helpful here or not? If so, I am of the belief that what
is used to record moves is needed. With this point, in a nutshell, is
there NEVER a need to simply pass a move onto a system to check whether or
not it is legal. If you were to have a GUI interface with a server for
example, is the GUI every turn supposed to pass the FEN onto the server as
a way to communicate a move?
3. As I said before, we are going to need a more robust FEN for handling
all sorts of abstract strategy games. The question is whether or not we
will also need a way to record moves. Do we need a way to store entire
games that were played or not? Should we come up with a more robust and
universal version of the PGN format or not? Are you advocating the
abolition of PGN and replacing it with a FEN solution? Well, you still
track games, but a file with records of games, rather than be a list of
moves, contains every single board move in the game in a single file.