From: Manabu Terao <manabu.terao <at> mx3 <dot> ttcn <dot> ne <dot> jp>
Date: 20 jan 2007
Subject: Re: Some thoughts on computer Shogi


Hello shogi-l subscribers,

I translated the first post made by Tord into Japanese and publish
it in my blog in the permalink at
 http://shogi.typepad.jp/brainstorm/2007/01/some_thoughts_o.html
so that I can see what impact it has in the country where the majority
of people with shogi-interest live in. So far, the following responses
have been observed in the comment field of my blog and in other's
blog entry trackbacked to my entry. Since I'm not at home with software
engineering so I apologize in advance if the English terminology I chose 
may be wrong sometimes.

* One person stated that he has thought the same thing as Tord suggested.
  He once tried to create a protocol between a GUI and a shogi engine, but
  suspended the work right now for some reason. He checked UCI at that
  time. He felt that it is too rigorous and a bit redundant. He advised
  that the USI based on the UCI should be more concise. He gave the pointer
  of a resource of shogi images to be used at 
  http://mucho.girly.jp/bona/
  The images there are for non-commercial use, free, can be modified and
  can be re-distributed. 
  
  I asked him what is the difference between CSA shogi and "USI" based
  on UCI? He replied as following.

  CSA shogi has minimal function such as displaying the current position
  on the board only. It cannot register multiple shogi engines for automatic
  paring and contest. And it cannot set up thinking time. In addition, 
  the shogi engine using CSA shogi must be created in the form of dll
  and cannot be easily compiled for non-MS OSes like Linux or Mac OS.

  And he recommended to download a chess GUI called Arena, which he
  said is one of the standard chess GUIs. (His purpose is for many
  Japanese to have a look at it since most of them seems to have not
  known any chess GUIs since the population of chess players in Japan
  is far less than that of shogi players and it's quite sure that 
  there are fewer persons who has used the downloadable chess softwares
  with non-Japanese description and GUI only. I think not only myself
  but also many Japanese got to know how the chess GUI works for the
  first time here in Japan after reading his comment.)

* Another person trackbacked to my blog entry. He mentioned to gnushogi.
  He admit it is very weak. But he said it might be become much stronger
  by updating the Book file(gnushogi.tbk in the misc directory of the 
  distributed tarball). He has a feeling that it will become stronger
  by adding the current games to the Book file.

So far now, there seems no objection/criticizm about the suggestion
by Tord.

I netsurfed and found that shogi freeware "Usapyon" has opened the
source to public through the page at
http://homepage1.nifty.com/Ike/usapyon/download.html

Hope this helps.
Manabu Terao


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