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Bin book adapter?
Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 7:22 am
by Ovyron
I can't get latest Cfish (from July) to use bin books. I can't get Polyglot to install in my GUI.
Is there a bin book adapter that is "transparent"? (it only passes commands from GUI to engine and back, so if the engine can be installed, the adapter can be installed; it'd play the moves from bin unless position doesn't exist in book, in that case it'd make it think)
Polyglot isn't being transparent as it seems it's not passing the engine's settings to the GUI (so they can be changed in GUI) and relies on changing them on Polyglot's ini file. I can't even set up a Polyglot ini file and run polyglot and use Stockfish's bench command, so I'm looking for a better alternative to use bin books (one that acts identical to running the engine).
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:22 am
by Guenther
Ovyron wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 7:22 am
I can't get latest Cfish (from July) to use bin books. I can't get Polyglot to install in my GUI.
...
Before other things need to be clarified in your quite useless post (almost all infos are missing - only unjustified rants vs. polyglot) lets start from the beginning.
Do you mean a compilation of Ronalds CFish from the link below?
https://chess.massimilianogoi.com/download/cfish/
What exactly was your error? Can't you select the book file in the UCI options from your 'mysterious' GUI?
(I guess you know that Polyglot isn't needed and it=CFish should be able to use the book directly)
(BTW 'bin' books are just 'binary' books and not necessarily polyglot books)
Just tested the CFish 20190717 from above mentioned site with a new polyglot book called addition2.bin
(by a guy called Waldemar - found it at the Chess2U forum, after I did a google search for newer polyglot books,
because I wanted to rule out that perhaps newer polyglot books are incompatible with that CFish version)
http://www.chess2u.com/t12849-addition-bin-book
It worked like a charm after I added the book name/location to the uci settings. (This was in CuteChess)
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 10:48 pm
by Ovyron
Oh boy Guenther, look for another job where you're better paid, I'd rather live with this problem than be treated badly.
Hoping to get assistance from someone that wants to help, if nobody exists, I guess that's life.
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:13 pm
by zullil
Ovyron wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 7:22 am
I can't get latest Cfish (from July) to use bin books. I can't get Polyglot to install in my GUI.
Is there a bin book adapter that is "transparent"? (it only passes commands from GUI to engine and back, so if the engine can be installed, the adapter can be installed; it'd play the moves from bin unless position doesn't exist in book, in that case it'd make it think)
Polyglot isn't being transparent as it seems it's not passing the engine's settings to the GUI (so they can be changed in GUI) and relies on changing them on Polyglot's ini file. I can't even set up a Polyglot ini file and run polyglot and use Stockfish's bench command, so I'm looking for a better alternative to use bin books (one that acts identical to running the engine).
Cfish can use a book.bin directly. PolyGlot is not required. Cfish has three book-related UCI options, which should be visible in any GUI:
option name BookFile type string default <empty>
option name BestBookMove type check default true
option name BookDepth type spin default 255 min 1 max 255
Simply supply the path of the book.bin you wish to use.
What GUI are you using?
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:59 pm
by Guenther
Ovyron wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 10:48 pm
Oh boy Guenther, look for another job where you're better paid, I'd rather live with this problem than be treated badly.
Hoping to get assistance from someone that wants to help, if nobody exists, I guess that's life.
Thank you for confirming that I was right to add you to my ignore list immediately, when you started spamming here again - only made an exception once to help you with this issue, but you are still not grown up from old troll times it seems with such an answer. Bye.
Obviously you did not seek for help (may be you need some other help though). No need to reply.
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:00 am
by Guenther
zullil wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:13 pm
Ovyron wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 7:22 am
I can't get latest Cfish (from July) to use bin books. I can't get Polyglot to install in my GUI.
Is there a bin book adapter that is "transparent"? (it only passes commands from GUI to engine and back, so if the engine can be installed, the adapter can be installed; it'd play the moves from bin unless position doesn't exist in book, in that case it'd make it think)
Polyglot isn't being transparent as it seems it's not passing the engine's settings to the GUI (so they can be changed in GUI) and relies on changing them on Polyglot's ini file. I can't even set up a Polyglot ini file and run polyglot and use Stockfish's bench command, so I'm looking for a better alternative to use bin books (one that acts identical to running the engine).
Cfish can use a book.bin directly. PolyGlot is not required. Cfish has three book-related UCI options, which should be visible in any GUI:
option name BookFile type string default <empty>
option name BestBookMove type check default true
option name BookDepth type spin default 255 min 1 max 255
Simply supply the path of the book.bin you wish to use.
What GUI are you using?
Forget him...
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:15 am
by hgm
Just out of curiosity, what Polyglot are you using? And are you sure you have installed it as UCI engine?
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 1:09 am
by Ovyron
zullil wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:13 pmWhat GUI are you using?
Thanks Zullill, I'm using InfinityChess GUI, setting the book in the BookFile type string doesn't work, I've tried also using the full book path, but the engine doesn't use the book.
I recently tried other engines and they don't work either (asmFish doesn't use book, and McCain and Honey make the GUI show errors when trying to change settings). The only engine that uses bin book natively is Eman (which is just a different derivative, so the others should work in theory - I wanted Cfish because it runs 300kn/s faster, and it's actual speedup by the engine's improved strength.)
hgm wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:15 amJust out of curiosity, what Polyglot are you using? And are you sure you have installed it as UCI engine?
It tried 1.4, 1.4.70b (most recent from
http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cg ... ;a=summary) and 2.0.1 (the one that comes with Winboard 4.7.3), none of them install (and the GUI doesn't have any problem installing any UCI engine, so whatever communication happening between UCI engines and the GUI isn't mimicked by Polyglot; Polyglot isn't producing a log file - I can't install AquariumBookAdapter either, so I guess it's a thing with adapters failing to pretend to just be a chess engine.)
Note - I know these are all GUI issues, I just find it curious that no adapter exists that just pretends to be the engine without adapter and uses bin books for it. Bin books seem to be useless without Polyglot and an engine that supports them natively, I wonder how the Winboard that ditches Polyglot manages to use Bin books.
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 1:33 am
by zullil
Ovyron wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2019 1:09 am
zullil wrote: ↑Thu Jul 18, 2019 11:13 pmWhat GUI are you using?
Thanks Zullill, I'm using InfinityChess GUI, setting the book in the BookFile type string doesn't work, I've tried also using the full book path, but the engine doesn't use the book.
I recently tried other engines and they don't work either (asmFish doesn't use book, and McCain and Honey make the GUI show errors when trying to change settings). The only engine that uses bin book natively is Eman (which is just a different derivative, so the others should work in theory - I wanted Cfish because it runs 300kn/s faster, and it's actual speedup by the engine's improved strength.)
hgm wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:15 amJust out of curiosity, what Polyglot are you using? And are you sure you have installed it as UCI engine?
It tried 1.4, 1.4.70b (most recent from
http://hgm.nubati.net/cgi-bin/gitweb.cg ... ;a=summary) and 2.0.1 (the one that comes with Winboard 4.7.3), none of them install (and the GUI doesn't have any problem installing any UCI engine, so whatever communication happening between UCI engines and the GUI isn't mimicked by Polyglot; Polyglot isn't producing a log file - I can't install AquariumBookAdapter either, so I guess it's a thing with adapters failing to pretend to just be a chess engine.)
Note - I know these are all GUI issues, I just find it curious that no adapter exists that just pretends to be the engine without adapter and uses bin books for it. Bin books seem to be useless without Polyglot and an engine that supports them natively, I wonder how the Winboard that ditches Polyglot manages to use Bin books.
Cfish includes direct support for binary book files in the PolyGlot format. Apparently, so does Eman, specifically added by that engine's maintainer: "Eman extends Stockfish capability by adding built-in support for PolyGlot BIN opening books."
Stockfish has no such support, and I suspect neither do most of its derivatives.
Cfish should be able to use any PolyGlot binary book file with any remotely functional GUI. All the GUI needs to do is pass along the path to the book file to Cfish. Once that BookFile option is correctly passed to Cfish, the engine will interact with the book file directly. The GUI doesn't need to do anything special, and the polyglot program is not needed.
So this should work with the InfinityChess GUI. I don't run Windows, so I can't test that.
Re: Bin book adapter?
Posted: Fri Jul 19, 2019 2:07 am
by Ovyron
zullil wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2019 1:33 am
All the GUI needs to do is pass along the path to the book file to Cfish.
That may be what the GUI isn't doing. Is there a way to send those commands directly to the engine after it is loaded? I think I'd need to send it:
setoption name BookFile value cfish.bin
And then it'd use the book. But despite seeing cfish.exe in task manager, I don't see any command prompt window where I can send commands to the engine after the GUI loads it.