Winboard book creation

[unic]

Hi,

I just noticed that Winboard now supports book creation.

Are there parameters one can set that affects this?

What algorithm is used? Will the resulting book (when doing one for vanilla chess) be similar to one created through polyglot, or will it have different weights than one created through polyglot would?

Also, just for testing, I created a book from a small database of about 27000 games - this took just over half an hour - is that normal? If so, some sort of progress indicator would sure be useful.

/Ola Mikael Hansson

[H.G.Muller]

This feature is still a bit experimental. I noticed for instance that it doesn't seem to work if you are running with and engine. The weights might be slightly different than those that Polyglot would give; I think I count a draw both as one win plus one loss. Otherwise the principle is the same: the weights are just the number of points scored with the move. Nothing advanced (yet).

As to the progress indicator: the intention was that you can see the progress through the highlighting in the Game List window. For reasons I have not been able to fathom yet, this ceases to work after some time, however. WinBoard becomes unresponsive then, and ignores all external signals. Which makes sense, as it is busy making the book. But apparently some of the calls to change highlighting of the game line or window titles that it makes from the book-creating code also work indirectly, through the event queue, and then get ignored as well. (Initially they do work, though, so I don't understand why at some point they would get queued.)

Anyway, if you left WinBoard alone long enough, eventually the book came out. And that was what mattered to me: I needed a mini-Shogi book.