Hi all,
I am reading the recent Quality Chess book "Pump Up Your Rating", about how
to be your own chess coach. It has an interesting chapter on how to work on
openings, using Chessbase and engines. I don't use Chessbase, I always use
Scid.
Most of what he does in Chessbase has equivalents in Scid, sometimes with a
bit more work (I think merging games is a bit smoother in Chessbase, and
I'm not entirely sure what "make an opening book of the list of games"
does).
But there are two related features he uses that I'd really like to have in
Scid.
First: when running an engine for infinite analysis, there is apparently an
"x" keypress that makes the engine consider the current position _with the
other side to move_. It basically analyzes "if I do nothing here, what can
my opponent do?", so it looks for threats. The process you as a player use
to look for good moves is very different depending on whether the opponent
is threatening something nasty, and computer moves are easier to understand
if you understand what was being threatened. So that sounds very useful to
me, and the book presents it as basically the most fruitful way to use an
engine when analyzing.
The other thing builds on that -- you can enter a "null move" in a game, so
basically the move switches to the other side. Then you can analyze as
normal from there. So you can use this to play through and analyze what is
being threatened.
Now, if I had to guess, I'd say that making it possible to run the engine
on the switched position is quite doable, and entering a null move in a
game is probably extremely hard since it touches on how Scid represents and
stores games. Either that, or it's already possible internally but not
exposed to the user interface. Is that intuition reasonable?
I know everybody is very busy so I'd like to try to implement a 'switch
sides' button in the Analysis window myself. Unfortunately I've never made
any changes to Scid and the last TCL I wrote was about fifteen years ago. I
guess I need to look for a good place to make additions in
tcl/tools/analysis.tcl, but I'd like it if someone could give me some
pointers on where I should make changes.
Greetings,
Remco Gerlich
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