Mike S. wrote:
It is true that the Arena book move selection is a bit difficult to tune, by the book settings each, and it seems much different from Fritz' method. One part of the problem may be that Arena doesn't seem to include the Elos into the book data. Anyway I did my best to create settings for these books, to provide a reasonable book behaviour. I'm afraid though that it's not 100% perfect!
Something better with .abk than with .ctg is, that Arena saves the book settings into the book files each.
Hi Mike. Yes, it is true that Arena does not follow the book settings like it should. As far as I can tell it seems that Arena 2.0 handles books better than Arena 1.1, but I could be wrong. I think the Arena developers may want to make some improvements here.
Thanks for the links to your books. I already had the Xmas2640 and Balanced-14 books. I've used your books under longer time controls before and they seem to perform better with longer time controls. Also, I understand that you were kind of going for variety in your books and not so much for strength. I use your books for running engine tournaments quite often. I just downloaded the NP91-09_2500 book and will run it through the tournament I am currently playing. After 4 rounds of play these are the current standings:
01: My book 15 32.0/56
02: Big Aristarch Book 31.5/56
03: Arena Opening Variety Book 1.20 31.0/56
04: Thinker Book 31.0/56
05: New Best Book 29.0/56
06: D-corbit-v02__superbook 28.5/56
07: Crafty 21.6 Book 28.0/56
08: HS-Book 28.0/56
09: D-grafen-v02__asb 28.0/56
10: Perfect v10 27.5/56
11: HS-20moves 27.5/56
12: A-schmidt-v03__shredder 26.5/56
13: Xmas2640 24.5/56
14: Balanced-14 23.5/56
15: Titus2.4 23.5/56
Arena Book Tournament
Blitz 1+1 time controls
420 games played
Some of these books you will recognize and some not. Most can be found online. I created the Big Aristarch Book, Thinker Book, New Best Book, and the Crafty 21.6 Book. Some of these books are ancient history like D-corbit-v02__superbook, D-grafen-v02__asb, and the A-schmidt-v03__shredder, but as you can see they are quite good as long as the settings are adjusted. The default setting were not working very well so I changed them for those last three just mentioned. I would like to point out that the standings will probably change after more games and that the book strength is probably affected by the time controls. Under long time controls the standings may be very different. After a couple of more rounds I will post the results again.
