Arena position set-up

[tomlynch]

Consider a position @50 black to move, W a5,c4, Nd3, Kc3, B a7, d6, f4, Ng6, Kf5. Goal: For Arena to have white play thirteen 51st moves in response to 50) ... a6, d5, f3, Nh4, Nh8, Nf8, Ne7, Ne5, Kg4, Kg5, Kf6, Ke5, and Ke4. ( The level used would be 40/120 ) If alternate communication preferred, my phone # is xxxxxxx, email tomlynch8888@att.net.

Thanks,

Tom Lynch, Des Plaines, IL, USA

[Aser Huerga]

If I understand correctly the goal, you can make an EPD file with these thirteen positions and then use the Engine->Automatic Analysis tool. You'd have to use seconds per move (180 sec. would be the average time).
To use 40/120 you'd have to set that level and makes the moves manually.

I hope it helps.

[Roger Brown]

Consider a position @50 black to move, W a5,c4, Nd3, Kc3, B a7, d6, f4, Ng6, Kf5. Goal: For Arena to have white play thirteen 51st moves in response to 50) ... a6, d5, f3, Nh4, Nh8, Nf8, Ne7, Ne5, Kg4, Kg5, Kf6, Ke5, and Ke4. ( The level used would be 40/120 ) If alternate communication preferred, my phone # is xxxxxxx, email tomlynch8888@att.net.

Thanks,

Tom Lynch, Des Plaines, IL, USA

Hello Tom Lynch,

This is the big, bad internet.

I think that your personal phone number is not required for communication about chess related matters.

I erred on the side of protecting your personal information and edited your post. Please re-post it if I erred and also accept my apology.

Later.

[tomlynch]

Dear Aser,

What is the CCRL team and does it provide services of this sort?

My question was in regard to one specific position wherein thirteen single moves would be entered somewhere enabling Arena to play through a move for each of the thirteen consecutively, storing the results.

You seem to refer to my former and still intended objective of loading sets of positions for Arena to play through to a given point. Based on my now experience with Arena that point would likely be only one move.

Point of emphasis: Would want to be loading in any respect board positions as opposed to typing piece notations for each position because of the labor. Task being attempted deals with many hundreds of positions.

[hgm]

CCRL = Computer Chess Rating List, and the team is a group of people that play engines against each other under controlled conditions, to determine their rating on the basis of the game results.

It is still completely obscure to me what you actually want to accomplish. Are these 13 moves part of a game, or are they 13 different moves from the same, given position? What do you mean by 'results' that you want stored? Evaluation score of the position after the move? PV? These are things Arena can never give you, because it is just a GUI, and doesnotknowhowtoplay Chess. Do you want to run an engine on the positions? What is wrong with entering the moves with the mouse? You want to try it 500 times, with 500 different engines?

If this is part of a game you want to feed to different engines? If so,why don't you cast it in PGN format and paste it into the GUI?

If you want tohave scores for different moves from the same position, why don't you simply paste the FEN for the position into the GUI and run the engine on it in multi-PV mode?

[tomlynch]

Hi H.G. Muller,

Working on irregular opening book; aren't aware that the moves (see 1) g3 lines exist anywhere with access). Want fastest ways to create this book using one engine at a time. Now have Houdini while Stockfish, Firebird and Critter are on the way. Have heard of chessok's software which enables multi engines responding to moves, just don't have the office to accomodate it. Would be happy to explain any details about this work and its intentions.

Current effectiveness of the GUI inclines me to work with one move at a time. The 13 move position was an abstract example used to illustrate my need. If possible the results being stored would be available to refer to after a given work cycle of the GUI has completed. Evaluation score, pawn unit value beneficial to have every few moves in the course of the opening in use.

I've made a note of what are now new ways to operate the GUI and appreciate it. However given the complexity of Arena, its scant Help files and my amateur computer status I still seek step-by-step instructions for what could be several ways to have the same objective accomplished.

If any component of CCRL is interested in assisting with this (and that could be in a variety of ways) please keep responding. This is by far the closest I've come in two years of attempts to contact people with both computer AND chess knowledge.

Tom Lynch

[hgm]

I now very little about building opening books, but I understand that basically you would want to subject the 13 positions that are derived from your initial position by the 13 different moves to analysis by several engines. My guess is that the most convenient way to do this is to write the 13 positions (together with other positions you might be interested in) to an FEN or EPD file, and let the GUI present that EPD file as a test suite to the set of engines you select for this. It seems that Arena has a mode to do EPD test suites.

I don't now anything about Arena, though. I am just interested in what users would be interested to do, so that when it seems generally useful, I can implement it in WinBoard.

[tomlynch]

Thanks again for responding, would this be more easily done using WinBoard?

Does CCRL provide potentially anyone who might take a demonstrative role in performing these functions for me/ with me, for compensation or other?

Would CCRL consider taking a line such as 1) g3 d5 2) Nf3 Nf6 3) Bg2 and getting the best moves made into an opening file?

Do you have any ideas as to how I could get someone's personal assistance herein? I made one sweep of online ads previously for services. An example of why assistance is preferred is that upon getting the right moves into context a huge step could be save if the positions could be automatically loaded into a book.

In any case thank you for info and good luck with your own work.

Tom Lynch

[hgm]

Thanks again for responding, would this be more easily done using WinBoard?

Currently WinBoard probably could not do anything like what you need at all. But WinBoard is different from most other GUIs in that it is open source. So if you are aprogrammer, (like I am), you can change it to do whatever you want, and then there is no limit to what you can do.

If I would know exactly what you want done,it would probably be only a minor modification to make WinBoard do it. WinBoard already has a 'tournament mode' where you can let a number of engines play games starting from a number of different positions given in a file. If I understand you correctly, this is already close to what you want, except that you want the 'games' to last only asingle move. This could be acheived (even without changing WinBoard in any way) by setting the engines you want to evaluate the positions against a dummy opponent that resigns as soon as it gets the move. So if you wanted to evaluate 13 positions with 5 engines, you would just ask WinBoard to play a gauntlet for the dummy (resigning) engine against 5 opponents, 13 games each, at a certain time control.

The only question (which probably would require some programming) is how exactly you like WinBoard to report. I could, for instance, make it wirite every engine analysis to a file as a single line,containing FEN, score, PV at the maximum depth reached by the engine, engine name. But you must specify the format thatwould be most useful to you.

Note I am not associated with CCRL in any way.