🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jun11.144407.7543@ctr.columbia.edu>, joe@AVS.COM (Joe Peterson) writes:
>There is another consideration when using 3.1 with xboard.  xboard uses
>the 4.0 type of setup for searchLevel, etc.  In other words, if you set
>searchLevel to 1 in 4.0, it will do what you expect, but in 3.1 you
>will instead get a time-per-move of 1 second, since xboard puts a 1 on
>the gnuchess command line (this is the level in 4.0, but in 3.1 you have
>to use the "depth" command to set searchLevel).
>

This is incorrect.  3.1 works the same as 4.0 if you give it only one argument
containing no colons---it sets the max depth, not the number of seconds for one
move.  I know the man page says otherwise, but the man page is wrong.  In 4.0
the developers chose to fix this bug by keeping the program the same and
changing the man page to match.  This allowed me to code xboard 2.0 so as to
work with either gnuchess 3.1 or 4.0.  (Though 3.1 accepts times only in
minutes.)

(By the way, I don't understand why anyone would want to set the max depth to
only one ply.  You can hardly expect gnuchess to find decent moves that way.  I
guess the search extensions for sequences of checks and captures should prevent
really bad blunders, though.)

	--Tim