Re: New backgammon engine: wildbg

[Philippe Michel]

On Fri, Nov 24, 2023 at 11:21:00AM -0800, Trevor Slocum wrote:

> I have drafted an initial specification of a Universal Backgammon Interface
> (UBI).
> 
> This protocol facilitates interoperable communication between backgammon
> engines and clients.

I have some comments on the <state> item and the evaluation commands and 
replies.

The <state> doesn't contain the cube value and position. Should they be 
transmitted earlier by another command ? It seems more natural to me 
that they belong to the state.

A similar issue exists for the match score (in "away" format ? 0-0 for a 
money game ? how to flag a Crawford game ?)

The OkDouble and OkMove replies don't contain the estimated equity ?

As described, maxmoves looks more like a minimum number of expected 
moves (if there are enough legal moves).

XG, GNUbg, and probably BGBlitz and Snowie use move filters, evaluating 
all moves at a low ply then doing a deeper evaluation of the most 
promising ones. It may be more natural to use 0 for "respond with the 
moves evaluated at the higher ply or rollout for the selected level" and 
other values for "respond with <n> moves", possibly implying "expand 
your move filter if needed".

Whether you agree with the latter or not, should it be expected that all 
returned moves have been evaluated at the same level ? Otherwise that 
level should be in the response (for each play). Maybe it should be 
there anyway.