extract evaluation from stockfish

[FaridKaveh]

I'm trying to build an engine based rating system for chess, very similar to what is described in this paper. To do this I need to extract the top N moves as given by an engine along with their centipawn evaluations. I'm building this in cpp. What is the easiest way to extract this information from Stockfish?

Ideally I would like to be able to loop this from my program, so something like:

while i < 1000:
choices = evaluate(positions[i]) <---- here 'evaluate' returns a list of top moves with their centipawn evaluations.
...do stuff...
end while

In the above 'positions' would be a vector of chess positions in FEN format.