OpenChess

Hello foks,

Recently i have been playing with chess engines at chesscube.com. They have set up an engine arena where we can play and test chess engines. I do have a bit of a project to tackle, and some advice is on order, from folks more knowleadgeable about programming.

My main problem is that so far i have been playing manually, that is, I have been making moves in my GUI/Chess engine software, (Fritz or Arena) by hand, and then pasting the move by hand into chesscube web based chessboard. I also have to reverse the steps when an opponent makes a move: i paste it back into my gui, and so on. This process wastes about half of my time on a typicial 15 min game. I have to setup my chess engine to play at 7min 5sec to stay up to speed and not losing on time, causing my engine to lose to some tough opponents,-- sometimes on time,sometimes by hastily making moves not thinking long enought to "solve" complex chess positions, I reckon--.

Some of my opponents have made their own autoplayers, and will not share it, so they enjoy a considerable advantage. I want to end that.

What i have conceived is that i should build a software that can read the screen on my gui chessboard, copy the moves made by my Gui/chess engine, and paste them into the web based board on chess.com.

I have considered to learn something relatively easy, like visual basic or python to tackle the problem. But I need some guidance. Is this something feasible for a programmer newbie like me? (I don't have any background on programming per se, althought i understand the concept and theory of programming rather well)

if it is feasable, can you give me some pointers on how to get started with the project?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

You don't want to write a screen scraper (so 1960's).
Intercept the API calls with something akin to inbetween by Odd Gunnar Malin, if you must.

A more sophisticated option would be to make your engine UCI-compatible and use the cute-cli command-line tool (https://github.com/cutechess) to test it against other UCI engines. The time and effort required to make your engine UCI compatible is a good investment, because it makes your work accessible from other GUIs, such as Arena, SCID, ChessGUI, ChessX, and most commercial GUIs.

Cheers!
Humble Programmer
,,,^..^,,,

I think that probably we need to get more clarification about what is really going on.
Since he would have to learn a programming language to collect the information he wants, it seems pretty clear that he has not written his own chess engine.
Maybe the solution to his problem is as simple as connecting online with Winboard and playing that way.