New book file elimates error messages.

[Sternbach, William [IT]]

Simon,

I downloaded the new book file which you suggested.

When I built the new book.dat, using the new book eliminated
the error messages I was receiving about illegal moves.

Thank you.

One interesting hobby I have is to let chess programs play
each other.  Its very easy.
You run both programs simultaneously, change program #1 so
you play black.  On program #2 you play white.
Since White always moves first, program #1 move first.
Then you make that move on program #2 and vice versa.

I am careful to keep the poly's the same on both programs.

I have several different chess playing programs.
It will be interesting to see if gnuchess becomes the champion.

I built gnuchess using GCC Version 3.2 using maximum optimization.
I have a Compaq Pentium III 733 MHZ pc with 384 MB ram running
Windows 2000 Professional.  Gnuchess with a poly of 8 moves in about
8 seconds on average.  I may experiment with higher poly's to improve
gnuchess play even more.

- Bill


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Waters [mailto:Simon@wretched.demon.co.uk]
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 3:15 PM
To: Sternbach, William [IT]
Subject: Re: Problem compiling opening book on Gnu Chess 5.4.


"Sternbach, William [IT]" wrote:
> 
> 1) Can I write a "C" program to remove the comments from the Book.pgn file
>     so it can be imported with no problems into book.dat?

You could, but SCID already has that feature, and many others,
it really is a great chess database program!

> 2) My book.pgn was 111 MB, but my book.dat is only 10 MB.
>     Is it correct for the book.dat file to be only 10% of the size
>     of the book.pgn file?

Yes, the format stores positions not moves, and throws out some
information from the book. The cleaned up version of the book is
about 25 MB compressed, SCID managed to store it in about 14MB,
which is even more efficient than the book format!
 
> 3) My book.dat file and the gnuchess.exe file are currently located in:
>     /gnuchess/src.   Is this the correct place to put them?

I assume this is Cygwin, in which case book.dat need only be in
the directory gnuchess.exe is run from. You may have to feed
this to a graphical interface.

Personally I don't use MS Windows much, but I use Winboard for
testing and I copy the gnuchess.exe and book.dat files over the
ones supplied with Winboard (making backups of course), so I
don't have to fiddle around with too much editing menu start-up
commands.

 Simon