Opening Books in Zippy

[mutation]

I'm using Sjeng on FICS which plays variants of chess. What I want is to use separate opening books for suicide, crazyhouse, bughouse, losers and standard chess. How do I do this?

[H.G.Muller]

If you want to use the Win/XBoard GUI book, and have the same process play all these variants, depending on how the FICS opponent challenges it, the only option is to put everything in the same book. There is no way WinBoard will switch book depending on the selected variant. You would have to merge all the books into one.

[mutation]

If you want to use the Win/XBoard GUI book, and have the same process play all these variants, depending on how the FICS opponent challenges it, the only option is to put everything in the same book. There is no way WinBoard will switch book depending on the selected variant. You would have to merge all the books into one.

If I merge everything into one book, will the engine automatically select the right moves when playing different variants from that combined book. Should I partition the moves in that combined book in some way into suicide, crazyhouse...etc?

[H.G.Muller]

It is WinBoard that would select the moves, not the engine. And WinBoard as well as the book know the variants are different. That is, the variant is part of the 'hidden game state', like castling and e.p. rights, and positions that differ in those will be considered different, even if the board postion is the same. So there is no need to partition the book, positions from different games will always be considered different positions.

[mutation]

It is WinBoard that would select the moves, not the engine. And WinBoard as well as the book know the variants are different. That is, the variant is part of the 'hidden game state', like castling and e.p. rights, and positions that differ in those will be considered different, even if the board postion is the same. So there is no need to partition the book, positions from different games will always be considered different positions.

One last question. How do I combine two book.bin files? Do I just copy paste all the contents from the two files in notepad and save it with the extension .bin or is there some other way of doing it?

[H.G.Muller]

No, that would not work. For one .bin files are not text files, so NotePad would probably choke on them or mutilate them. And the positions in a .bin book must be sorted in ascending order of their identifying key, so appending one book to another would never work.

I thought that Polyglot did have a book-merge function. I don't think it would care whether these are books for regular Chess or variants, as it is impossible to deduce from the keys of positions what the original positions are. I am not completely sure how it works, but you can probably find it in the Polyglot documentation.

How did you get the books in the first place? Usually books are made from PGN files with games. If you would still have the game files from which the books are made you could put all these games in a single file, and create a book of that with the WinBoard 'Save Games as Book' function. (Or read them one by one into WinBoard, and use 'Save Games as Book' repeatedly, as this function just adds the games to the book it made before.)