Re: [XBoard-devel] Load Next / Prev Position menu

[h.g. muller]

> The easiest way would just be to print "position 1" "position 2", etc..
> you click on them and the position shows up on the board, where you can
> check if it's the one you want... I think this would be similar to if
> you have a "next/previous position" menu entry.. there you also don't
> know what you get...

This would be a major operation, even when using existing code for the
Game List. I don't think it would be wise to try put it in fro 4.5.0.

> A nicer way would be to show a small picture of the position. To create
> these you would have to load them in xboard, but I think this would be
> pretty nice... the window could then have a list with a name (say
> position N) and a picture next to it and you click on it, you see the
> position on the large board from where you can play around with it,
> start an engine to analyze it or do whatever you wanted to do ;)

It sounds nice, but for now it is totally science fiction...

> This could be also nice for multiple games, you could show the name and
> a picture of the end position (or something in the middle or the
> beginning or animated on mouse-over) for example, that could help
> finding the right game out of a long list of games... say you want to
> find the game where you played that interesting endgame, but don't
> remember the details of the game...

I am not sure it would be very helpful. Either it would require people to
stare at a collection of microscopic board images, or you would have
so few in view that it would be useless, and you have somehow scroll
through it anyway, defeting the purpose. Even if the 'thumbnails' of the
position would be displayed, say, in a 3x3 array,showing 9, I doubt very
much if you could identify a sought position at a glance. You would
need to focus attention on them sequentially. Visual tasks can be
distinguished into O(0) and O(1) processes. An O(0) process can be
done at such a low level of optical processing that it happens in the
brain centers that still do fully parallel processing. Like distinguishing
a red dot amongst black dots. You do that equally fast whether there
are 10,000 or 1,000,000 dots topick the red dot from. But Chess
positions are too complex for these brain centers.

Now scanning visual attention can be faster than performing motor
actions like mouse clicking. But in this case, keeping your attention
focusedon a single place where Chess positions appear (the board
window) and relying on auto-repeat of a menu key to let them flash
by there seems an extemely competative way to do it.

For comparison: When I boot up Linux, the first thing I usually do in my
terminal window is to mount the Windows file system on /C:, through some
quite complex command (because it has to be done read-only). No doubt
this can be done automatically, but I never bothered, because the terminal
remembers the command history, and I use the Up arrow to scan through
it at 10 per second until I see something fly by that starts with "sudo".
Even when I gave a hundred commands in the previous session, this
just takes a few seconds, and it never fails.

Note that by setting a timeDelay of 0, loaded games will be instantly
displayed as their final position. So with a next/previous menu key
on auto-repeat you could do really fast visual searching by final position.
My guess is that this would work much better than a list of thumb nails
that you would have to scroll through. Because the positions appear
all in the same place, saving your eyes the 'seek time' to ump to and
stabilize the image of the next.



> Probably too much work, but I think it would be a nice touch... Anyway,
> I would go with just giving the positions a generic name and number them...

OK, so actually the only to options for 4.5.0 are: drop the menu items,
or keep them...


> ARUN