Winboard Forum

I am using xboard 4.5.2+ with crafty v23.1.

Is crafty a pure algorithm, or did it also include opening and endgame books when I installed it? I installed it with the Synaptic Package Manager in bodhi linux. The download & installation time was just a few minutes. From what I understand opening books and endgame databases are very, very huge and I don't think it could have downloaded such databases in such a short time. But maybe it comes with some sort of stripped-down databases?

Second, *if* crafty indeed uses some kind of opening books and/or endgame database, its there any possibility for me to find out if the program plays inside or outside of the book while I am playing against it?

I.e. when I play against crafty interactively via xboard, I want to know which move is the first move it makes after leaving the opening book, and which move is the last move it makes before entering an endgame database. How can I find this out?

(I admit that my question is more about crafty than about xboard, still I thought this is a good place to ask, sorry if its off-topic).

This is the good forum section for asking such questions. Note I virtually never used Crafty, though. But you can rest assured engine packages do not contain end-game tablebases. About the book I am not sure; in general maintainers don't like big books to bloat their packages, and don't include them. I know that Crafty has its own book format. Perhaps there is something available from the Crafty website.

In general you know that an engine is in book because it replies instantly. It might also print "book move" or something like that in stead of a PV in the engine-output window.

Note that you can also let XBoard use a book on behalf of any engine; in this case you would need a bookin Polyglot format, as used by Fruit. (Not sure if such a book is included in the Fruit package. Sometimes books aredistributed as separate packages.) In that case you would have to indicate the book file in the Common Engine Options dialog, and tick there that the engine has no own book.