I guess this might really be an engine question, but when I copy a FEN
notation into Scid, the Scidlet engine can't do any analysis - it says that
the starting position is non-standard and therefore it can't do any
analysis. So, is there a Scid compatable engine that will do the analysis,
or are there tools to generate bogus moves to yield a certain position?

Any and all help appreciated.

-gk-


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On Fri, 28 Apr 2006 13:30:29 -0500, 39N 95W wrote:

I guess this might really be an engine question, but when I copy a FEN
notation into Scid, the Scidlet engine can't do any analysis - it says that
the starting position is non-standard and therefore it can't do any
analysis. So, is there a Scid compatable engine that will do the analysis,
or are there tools to generate bogus moves to yield a certain position?

GNU Chess seems happy to analyse from a non-standard position with SCID.
It also starts analysing straight away rather than waiting for a move to
be made.

When you add "gnuchess" you want the parameter "--xboard" or "-x" in the
engine definition to make it use the Winboard protocol.

I've sometimes seem the analysis and board get out of sync, if you figure
out why this happens let me know.

On 2006-04-29, Simon Waters wrote:

Hi!

I guess this might really be an engine question, but when
I copy a FEN notation into Scid, the Scidlet engine can't
do any analysis - it says that the starting position is
non-standard and therefore it can't do any analysis. So,
is there a Scid compatable engine that will do the
analysis, or are there tools to generate bogus moves to
yield a certain position?

GNU Chess seems happy to analyse from a non-standard
position with SCID.

Maybe you will want to use a stronger engine though. Crafty
comes to mind as a free engine. For others like Fruit or
TogaII you'll need PolyGlot or the like. Setup is streight
forward, you'll find some information on this e.g. he

http://theorie.physik.uni-wuerzburg..../shredder.html

Yes, I know it deals with Shredder. But form the setup
using Polyglot its the same for Fruit or Toga or whatever,
all of them are UCI engines.

Included on the page is also a patch against Polyglot 1.3
(did not have the time yet to implement it on 1.4) to get
the scoring correctly in scid. That is if you annotate a
game automagically to get a score graph you'll want to have
this patched version.

I've sometimes seem the analysis and board get out of
sync, if you figure out why this happens let me know.

Never experienced these problems with either crafty or any
of the aforementioned engines. I'd guess that gnuchess is
just thinking and not processing the interrupt signal from
scid properly.

Anyway, for analysing you'll probably really want a stronger
engine anyway. Staying free I'd suggest Crafty, Fruit, Toga.
Shredder is also very nice (but not free of course).

--

Kind regards,
Alexander Wagner