Winboard book settings

[zenpawn]

It's been my experience that the First/Second has Own Book checkboxes in the Options | Common Engine Settings are not retained upon closing/reopening Winboard.

Is there perhaps a command line option to ensure your engine uses a given book?

Thanks,
-Erin

[MikeB]

It's been my experience that the First/Second has Own Book checkboxes in the Options | Common Engine Settings are not retained upon closing/reopening Winboard.

Is there perhaps a command line option to ensure your engine uses a given book?

Thanks,
-Erin

this might help, but I have never tried it

Code: Select all

Opening book - The remaining options are for controlling the opening book used by XBoard. This book can be used to play openings for the engines, without the engines being consulted. (The moves selected by XBoard from the book will be forced to the engine, and the engine will be started to think for itself only when XBoard gets out of book.) You can specify any opening book in Polyglot format as book file, but to make it possible for XBoard to use it, 'Use GUI Book' should also be checked. This still does not mean XBoard will use the book for all engines; to use it for a specific engine, the 'Has Own Book' option for that engine should be switched off. By default it would be switched on after loading an engine, except when this engine was installed with the explicit request to use the book. In tournaments you can overrule this default, though, and make all participants start from the GUI book unless they explicitly request to not use it (which they almost never do, unless you edited the engine list by hand). Finally you can set for how many (full) moves the book should at most be used, and specify the book variation by a number from 0 to 100: 100 would mean totally random selection of all moves the book has for the current position, while 0 would mean it only plays the best move(s) listed in the books. The value 50 here would play the moves in proportion to the probabilities the book suggests. 

https://www.gnu.org/software/xboard/use ... Guide.html

[Ferdy]

It's been my experience that the First/Second has Own Book checkboxes in the Options | Common Engine Settings are not retained upon closing/reopening Winboard.

Is there perhaps a command line option to ensure your engine uses a given book?

Thanks,
-Erin

Code: Select all

-firstHasOwnBookUCI true (x) 
-secondHasOwnBookUCI true (x)
-fNoOwnBookUCI true (x) 
-sNoOwnBookUCI true (x) 
-firstXBook (x) 
-secondXBook (x)

Have a look on manual.html file.

[hgm]

It's been my experience that the First/Second has Own Book checkboxes in the Options | Common Engine Settings are not retained upon closing/reopening Winboard.

That is correct. The 'has own book' options are associated with an engine (like all the options that exist in a first/second form). It is in general undesirable to make such options persistent, as next time you might run with different engines. The engine choice itself is also not persistent.

The intended use of these option is to be put with a specific engine in WinBoard's engine list. E.g. Fairy-Max is installed in this list as

"Fairy-Max 4.8"-fcp "fmax.exe" -fd "..\Fairy-Max" /firstXBook

in which the addition /firstXBook switches the 'has own book' off, in deviation of the default. (This is a short form of /firstHasOwnBookUCI false.) When you install an engine through the Load Engine dialog you can force adding this /firstXBook option to the engine line by UNticking "Must not use GUI book", which would start ticked by default.

Note that for tournaments there is an option "Make all use GUI book by default", which unticks the "has own book" options before loading a new engine for the current pairing. Then even engines not installed with the /firstXBook option would use GUI book, and only engines that were explicitly installed with an extra option /firstHasOwnBookUCI true would still have to rely on their own books. But normally no engines have that, as this already is the default situation.

[zenpawn]

Thank you!

On a side note, am I correct that Winboard only supports polyglot opening books?

[hgm]

That is correct. There aren't many publicly discosed book formats anyway.