WinBoard 4.3.15 released

[hgm]

The /ini argument asks WB to save the settings in that file (on exit or when you press the menu).

If you don't want that, you should use @wood.ini in the target field of the shortcut.

To use the polyglot book, go to the Options -> UCI... menu. Make sure the Polyglot Book field is set to the filename of a valid book, and tick "use Book". Then untick the boxes "hasOwn Book" for the engines that you want to use the GUI book. Finally click "OK". That should do it.

[slobo]

The /ini argument asks WB to save the settings in that file (on exit or when you press the menu).

If you don't want that, you should use @wood.ini in the target field of the shortcut.

To use the polyglot book, go to the Options -> UCI... menu. Make sure the Polyglot Book field is set to the filename of a valid book, and tick "use Book". Then untick the boxes "hasOwn Book" for the engines that you want to use the GUI book. Finally click "OK". That should do it.

Yes, after unticking the boxes "hasOwn Book" for the engines, the polyglot book works for winboard engines. I think, however, it is not logical that menu called "UCI Options" solve the problem of winboard engines.

Now my question is: how could I limit my polyglot book to 8 or 10 plies? I don´t want to use all book moves.

How could I visualize the book moves?

How could I change book moves - edit, delete, change priority ?

Regards. SL

[Guenther]

The /ini argument asks WB to save the settings in that file (on exit or when you press the menu).

If you don't want that, you should use @wood.ini in the target field of the shortcut.

To use the polyglot book, go to the Options -> UCI... menu. Make sure the Polyglot Book field is set to the filename of a valid book, and tick "use Book". Then untick the boxes "hasOwn Book" for the engines that you want to use the GUI book. Finally click "OK". That should do it.

Yes, after unticking the boxes "hasOwn Book" for the engines, the polyglot book works for winboard engines. I think, however, it is not logical that menu called "UCI Options" solve the problem of winboard engines.

Now my question is: how could I limit my polyglot book to 8 or 10 plies? I don´t want to use all book moves.

How could I visualize the book moves?

How could I change book moves - edit, delete, change priority ?

Regards. SL

If it is 'your' Polyglot book, why not compiling a new one with the
desired length, else you can go for any other Polyglot book with that length.

For all other points you should use a newer Scid version from
Pascal Georges.

Guenther

[hgm]

Yes, after unticking the boxes "hasOwn Book" for the engines, the polyglot book works for winboard engines. I think, however, it is not logical that menu called "UCI Options" solve the problem of winboard engines.

Now my question is: how could I limit my polyglot book to 8 or 10 plies? I don´t want to use all book moves.

How could I visualize the book moves?

How could I change book moves - edit, delete, change priority ?

Regards. SL

Indeed, the name of that menu is starting to become less and less appropriate. In XBoard 4.3.15 (where it had to be newly added) I already picked another name for it: "Engine Settings...". This kind of collided with the already existing WB menu "Options -> Engine...", which I added in XBoard under the name "Adjudications...". The distribution of controls over the menus is slightly different in XBoard, to fit the new names better.

I decided to postpone changing the menu names in WinBoard, because people were already used to those names, and the names are probably not final: The new names in future XBoard versions will probably change as well, because there will be 2 new menus "Engine #N Settings" to control the engine-defined options of UCI and WB engines. The menu that is now called "Engine Settings" will then probably be called "Common Settings".

As to the book: WB is not a book-building utility. It never writes the book. It merely probes books in Polyglot format, which were likely made and maintained by Polyglot.

I am not familiar with using opening books, however, so any suggestion is welcome. If it is desirable that an existing book can be limited to a certain depth, it is easy enough to add another parameter /bookDepth=N, where N is a number of ply. WinBoard can then refrain from probing the book after this move number is reached.

I will probably also add a general parameter to distort the book weights. Currently WB plays in strict proportion to the weight listed in the book. I wanted to add the option to play in proportion of an arbitrary power of that book weight. This allows the user to interpolate between the extremes were only the best move is chosen, (power = infinite), or where all moves are chosen with equal probability (power = 0).

[Michel]

I wanted to add the option to play in proportion of an arbitrary power of that book weight. This allows the user to interpolate between the extremes were only the best move is chosen, (power = infinite), or where all moves are chosen with equal probability (power = 0).

This very elegant. I like this idea a lot (why not allow negative powers, this could
give interesting games since now rare moves will be favored).

One more thing. There is an ambiguity in the PG book specification. Fabien decided
to disallow moves with zero weight although there is I think no reason to do so. Nonetheless we are stuck with this since engines and GUIs implementing PG books
may already rely on this assumption.

For GUI tools like SCID moves with zero weight are very convenient since they allow you to include a move in the book and at the same time make sure the engine will not play it.

To simulate a move with zero weight SCID gives it very low probability (<0.1%). Still probability theory dictates that eventually the engine will play such a low probability move.
This will also happen if you set the "power" in your proposal to zero.

So I think it would be best if the engine or the GUI (or any PG book user) would
filter out such low probability moves before hand.

[hgm]

I can simply subtract 1 from all weights before processing them. Then they would not be played for any power > 0. What happens when power = 0 depends on how exactly I implement the calculation, as 0^0 is mathematically undefined. I could define it as 0 (to prevent a floating exception).

But why would people want to have moves with zero weight in the book if they are never going to be played?

[Michel]

I can simply subtract 1 from all weights before processing them

This is not a good idea as moves with weight one occur often (they are relative).

But why would people want to have moves with zero weight in the book if they are never going to be played?

This is what Fabien must have thought.

BUT: it is part of book tuning (which SCID can do). Suppose you have an d4/e4 book. Depending on your opponent you may decide to play only d4 of e4. You do this
by setting the weight of the other move to zero in SCID.

What is against declaring 0.001 as a treshhold? I can put it in the specification since
it is backwards compatible.

[hgm]

This is ugly. It seems that we would have to redefine the meaning of the weights in a non-obvious way (subtracting a quantity related to the sum of all the weights of the move from a given position). And all this because SCID uses some poorly designed kludge to tune the book.

Within the current standard (which is perhaps unnecessarily restrictive), it should disable the move by really removing it. If for some reason it considers that too expensive, and wants to have books with temporarily disabled moves in it, it should define an extension of the format, (by allowing weight 0), and take it for granted that some book users will not be able to use the new format, or take the small risk that the move is played anyway.

The probability that there exist book users that would not be able to handle a weight of zero (if the weight encoding is a regular int) is extremely slight; I would expect problems only when all moves leading from a position have zero weight. (In which case the SCID kludge would not work anyway.)

If SCID can arrange it such that moves you'd rather not play retain a residual probability of 0.01, I think this is something users can very well live with. It is not like the occasional playing of such a move would lead to the immediate loss of the game. Anyway, I think it is preferable to fix this problem in SCID rather than bend the standard by redefining of the weights.

[slobo]

The /ini argument asks WB to save the settings in that file (on exit or when you press the menu).

If you don't want that, you should use @wood.ini in the target field of the shortcut.

To use the polyglot book, go to the Options -> UCI... menu. Make sure the Polyglot Book field is set to the filename of a valid book, and tick "use Book". Then untick the boxes "hasOwn Book" for the engines that you want to use the GUI book. Finally click "OK". That should do it.

I changed the names of my 4 small and addicional ini files: they all now star with @ character, as you suggested. As a consequence, when I Save Setting Now, from the Option menu, my small and additional ini file is not replaced by winboard.ini. So, one problem is solved. But there is another problem: Save Setting Now does not work anymore. I have to edit winboard.ini to change things.

Is there any way to use a small additional ini file from the command line without the /ini argument?

regards

[Michel]

Anyway, I think it is preferable to fix this problem in SCID rather than bend the standard by redefining of the weights.

It is not a problem with SCID. It is a limitation of the Polyglot Book format.

If PG refuses to make books with zero weights and even has an ASSERT in its probing routine to verify this I don't think SCID should start generating books with weights that are mathematically zero.

It is also not bending the standard since currently there is no standard how the weights are to be interpreted. So we can make the standard whatever we want to. So stating
that moves with probability < 0.001 should be ignored is perfectly valid since it changes current behaviour only in 0.1% of the cases and fixes an ambiguity.

But it was just a suggestion. If you don't like it, just ignore it.