GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 703950
provide some randomness in play
Last modified: 2013-07-28 19:20:52 UTC
When I play the default GNUchess engine, it responds the same way to every opening move at a given difficulty level. For example, at Difficulty: Easy (which is actually not very easy) if I start with 1a. e4 it always plays 1b. Nc6. At Difficulty: Normal, if I start with 1a. e4 it always plays 1b. Nf6. That's not very interesting. It would be nicer if there were some randomness in its play, at least in the opening moves.
There used to be an xboard command to tell GNUChess to randomize play [1]. Unfortunately it was removed a long time ago, so this isn't possible with GNUChess anymore. [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/chess/manual/gnuchess.html#Command-list (In reply to comment #0) > For example, at Difficulty: Easy > (which is actually not very easy) I'm tentatively planning to change the default engine, and if not then at least change the settings considerably. This is Bug #475535. My priority will be to make the game (much) easier, but I that it'd be good for the openings to have more variety, and I'll keep this in mind while exploring the options. Thanks for your report - keep them coming!
(In reply to comment #1) > There used to be an xboard command to tell GNUChess to randomize play [1]. > Unfortunately it was removed a long time ago, so this isn't possible with > GNUChess anymore. But every CECP engine we support does recognize the Random command. GNUChess responds with a warning that it's not implemented, but none of the other engines do. So I'm going to add this to the commands we send to CECP engines; I bet GNUChess isn't the only one who will ignore it, but that's the best we can do. UCI has no standard Random command, unfortunately.
Created attachment 250284 [details] [review] Always send Random command to CECP engines Some may ignore it, but for others this should help to vary play. Not putting this into engines.conf since it would have to go basically everywhere.
Comment on attachment 250284 [details] [review] Always send Random command to CECP engines Sorry that this won't help with GNUChess (or probably most engines), but this is the best we can do. Some or many engines will respect it.
Thanks, Michael!