Re: [Gnushogi-devel] [Patch 0/1] Switch to getopt cmdline parsing

[H.G. Muller]

I have been involved in the development of GNU Shogi a few years ago, in 
particular
for making it XBoard compatible. (Originally it was using some mutilated 
dialect of
XBoard protocol to communicate with xShogi, a now totally obsolete fork 
of XBoard.)

I was never motivated to do something about the AI, however. The problem 
is that
GNU Shogi's AI must be excessively buggy, because it truly plays like 
crap. Even
general-purpose Chess-variant engines like Sjaak II, when configured 
with Shogi
rules and not completely idiotic piece values, will totally crush it, 
because virtually
ever move it plays is a blunder of astronomic proportions.

I have already written two Shogi engines of my own, however (one of them 
even
able to play several Shog variants, including the 11x11 Wa Shogi) which 
are again
far stronger than general-purpose engines, although not early as strong 
as Shogi
engines based on data mining, such as Bonanza (which is also open source).
And there seems to be no reason at all to patch an engine that is ~3000 
Elo weaker
then state of the art, and ~1500 Elo weaker than what a trivial (say 
200-line) code
written from scratch could do.

Op 2/8/2018 om 2:47 AM schreef Chen Chen:
> Hi Justin,
>
> The patch seems quite good. The hand-written argument parsing is indeed
> out-of-date.
>
> And yes, the development of this repo has been stalled for years.
>
> Regards,
> Chen