I've thought a lot in the past about correspondence chess, and the current state of such. There are a number of online solutions, most of them not so great. Twitter-based ChessTweets is my current favorite solution (anyone who wants a fight, @brhfl) although the constant barrage of DMs from the system does get somewhat irritating. I use the somewhat clumsy XBoard with a variety of engines for the sake of analysis, but using it for correspondence is far from ideal. This task seems the perfect opportunity to demonstrate that less is more, and create a CLI interface which acts as a somewhat dumb client for displaying a board and interpreting moves. While I will probably never actually code this, I hope that perhaps I will some day, and I will call it scorch for Simple Correspondence Chess.
brian hefele's untidy space
SCorCh - Simple Correspondence Chess
Happy Belated Birthday, Alan Turing
(The late) Alan Turing's birthday was yesterday, and I meant to write this post yesterday, but I didn't, so here it is now. Anyone with an interest in computing (note: not computers) already knows everything there is to know about Turing, but for everyone else, here's a little background. Turing was a mathematician (among other things). At the time (let's say late 1920s through 1954), there weren't computer scientists, because there weren't computers, not as we know them. There was a lot of math, though, and one way to help formulate a proof, help work through an algorithm or a complex mathematical function is by having some sort of device to help you.
On smartenter and fish
I've been busy with a number of (unfortunately more important) things, and haven't really put much effort into z in the past few days. I did put a bit more thought into smartenter, however, and have come to the conclusion that I must put it on hold for now. As much as I would like to polish it up, one thing stands in my way that would make z a better investment in my time - command history. If I code z correctly, it should be able to behave much like smartenter does now, but I probably still won't make much use of it.