Chess Engines with Opening Book

[mephisto]

Hi Graham
Yes I read that!
Bryan

[Ras]

CT800 doesn't have a config file, but the internal book can be disabled via the standard UCI "ownbook" command.

[jp]

The Cerebellum book used by Brainfish is external. It is not part of the executable. It is just an advanced book made by mini-maxing a huge pile of chess data.

It is a more sophisticated format than polyglot books (and the data is better than most polyglot books), but I still consider it to be rather primitive.

Is it possible for other engines to use it?

[Dann Corbit]

The Cerebellum book used by Brainfish is external. It is not part of the executable. It is just an advanced book made by mini-maxing a huge pile of chess data.

It is a more sophisticated format than polyglot books (and the data is better than most polyglot books), but I still consider it to be rather primitive.

Is it possible for other engines to use it?

Yes, there is a library for it.
However, only the "reduced" book is free. You have to pay for the full version.
If you look at Sedat's book contests, it is no longer the strongest book.

[Guenther]

I think my post was misleading, sorry.
What I meant to say was, are there any other PC chess engines that have an opening book within their .exe file.

This is not really accurate.
The Cerebellum book used by Brainfish is external. It is not part of the executable. It is just an advanced book made by mini-maxing a huge pile of chess data.

In a first attempt I wanted to write the same, but then I remembered that the very first versions of Brainfish really had
the book compiled into the binary. (I still have one of them here)
Actually this is more or less just a gimmick, which has only disadvantages.

[Ras]

Actually this is more or less just a gimmick, which has only disadvantages.

The main problem of course is that modifying the book requires a recompile so that it can't be replaced easily. For me, the reason is that the embedded target hardware doesn't have a file system, which leaves a bytewise C array as only useful option. The PC version just has the same code for the book.

[MikeB]

The Cerebellum book used by Brainfish is external. It is not part of the executable. It is just an advanced book made by mini-maxing a huge pile of chess data.

It is a more sophisticated format than polyglot books (and the data is better than most polyglot books), but I still consider it to be rather primitive.

Is it possible for other engines to use it?

The current cerebellum book is in polyglot format and can be used by any GUI that reads that format - either directly or through the polyglot adapter. As an example, I just tested the Cerebellum book from brainfish and it works with Komodo under the xBoard GUI. With brainfish, of course, you can use two books,the cerebellum book and a separate polyglot book attached to the GUI.

[Michel]

Actually this is more or less just a gimmick, which has only disadvantages.

The main problem of course is that modifying the book requires a recompile so that it can't be replaced easily. For me, the reason is that the embedded target hardware doesn't have a file system, which leaves a bytewise C array as only useful option. The PC version just has the same code for the book.

It is quite easy to link arbitrary files in an executable.

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/em ... rsion-5967

EDIT I assume that with fmemopen you can even get an ordinary FILE pointer to the embedded file so that the required code changes are minimal.

[Ras]

It is quite easy to link arbitrary files in an executable.

Yeah, that's also an option. I also need to convert the book from the variant based edit format to the position based runtime format, so there has to be a converter program in-between anyway, and that puts out an autogenerated C file with data, metadata and some defines. xxd can do that for files that don't need a conversion.