Just starting to write a chess engine...

[bigpappa8]

I've just started writing a chessprogram, for fun. My question is how I can in a nice and efficient way test/meassure the power of my engine... are there any free servers I can connect to, and have it play against another engine?
If so, where do I find info on how to communicate with these servers?
Or what other methods are there? How do you guys do it?

And... since this is only for fun, Im not too happy about spending a bunch of money on this..

[isdnip]

This is an OpenPGP/MIME stupidly signed message (RFC 2440 and 3156).

[bigpappa8]

I guess my next question is... where do I find info (from a programmers point of view) on the WinBoard protocol or even the UCI protocol (since it seems to be newer)?

FICS usually allocate accounts to computers reasonably happily.

www.freechess.org

The human opposition is fairy limited but you can usually find a few world class chess programs willing to crush other programs, running on monster hardware lurking.

If you program supports Winboard protocol it can talk to the chess servers through Xboard or Winboard, or icsdrone.

I dare say similar things apply for the other well known chess engine protocol (UCI).

The "Win At Chess" test set is widely available, where you test the ability of the program to find specific moves in studied positions.

"Win at Chess" is getting a bit long in the tooth, even my rather old
Laptop is now solving 275 out of the 300 positions at 5 seconds a move running GNU Chess 5.07.

However plenty of harder test sets are available.

Usually these are distributed as EPD file.

I don't spend money on doing it, unless you count all those computers and bandwidth..

[cychong]

Well, you won't find many titled players on FICS but there's usually a fair range of persons logged in at pretty much any strength lower than that..

[bruisedprodigy]

There is a description of the Winboard/Xboard protocol at Tim Mann's website. Check:

http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard/engine-intf.html.

[isdnip]

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[get sirius]

Do a search on Google for winboard or UCI. There are some pretty good websites that cover this stuff..

[cychong]

Finally sure. Just out of itnerest, surely do the strong plkayers often play against computers?.

[bigpappa8]

Thanks for the previous answers in this thread.

I've now separated my GUI from my engine, and the engine is now winboard compatible.
However, I *do* want to write my own GUI as well. I've recently started .NETing, and I've decided to write the GUI in VB.NET. My main question now is - how do I make my GUI "connect" to my engine (and other engines)?
I've read that I need to open a pipe, although that doesn't tell me much (since I don't really know what that is).
Does anyone have a link to some info about this? Any piece of information is appreciated.
I've worked with programming for a handful of years in different languages but, at the risk of being laughed at here, I've never created/opened a pipe between applications before..