Book for gnuchess

[Yasen]

I'm new to Zaurus and Linux but I`m willing  to lerarn both. I`ve installed gnuchess and qboard but without the book it plays very monotonously. I'm wondering where I have to put book.pgn.gz and  book.pgn.gz.sig and if I have to gunzip the book.
 Yasen

[qx773]

You do need to gunzip the book.pgn.gz file and then convert the book.pgn file to book.dat, whose data is in the word size and endianness of the machine on which you create the book.dat file.  I created a book.dat file a long while ago and forgot how I did it.  Gnuchess may have an option to do the conversion for you.  I tried to upload the book.dat file in a zip file here, but I could not do it for some reason.

[ScottYelich]

every time I've compiled gnuchess -- it has created the books for me...
so I'd assume one could just check the normal makefile for the gnuschess install and see
the commands that are used.  It's proably a variation of computer-play-itself-with-depthX-and-dump-all-variations for 1 to 8 moves... or something.

Scott

[qx773]

The *.pgn files are records of actual games, and there are differently sized *.pgn files depending on how large of an opening book you want, so the book created by the compilation of gnuchess is probably not the same.

I have temporarily placed an almost 8 megabyte file on:

<link removed>

This file uncompresses into an 11 megabyte+ file.  Perhaps someone else will have better luck putting it in the ZUG download area, if the site administrator is willing to host the file.

I do not recall where the book.dat file has to be placed.  If I recall correctly, when you run gnuchess from the command line and make a move like c4, gnuchess informs you where it is looking for the book.dat file.  You can link that file with a command like:

ln -s /mnt/cf/book.dat book.dat

to create a symbolic link in the current directory to a book.dat file that is located on a compact flash card.

[ScottYelich]

thank you.

hosted/mirrored:  http://zaurus.spy.org/feeds/misc/misc/gnuchess-book.zip

Scott

[Yasen]

10x bouth of you

[ScottYelich]

does it play better now?

If so, I'll go give it a try...

normally, I just use aterm + xboard -ics  
and then my alias -->  g games *19tRs-C-b-B-d
so I can follow high ranked players.

see:  http://zaurus.spy.org/screenshots/scottyel...jpg/xboard1.jpg

Scott

[qx773]

Tonight, I installed the gnuchess 5.04 program into the internal memory of my Zaurus SL-C760.  The gnuchess program apparently looks in the current directory for the book.dat file.  So, if you go into the terminal program and type the link command that I mentioned above when the book.dat file is on a compact flash card, gnuchess will use the opening book.  Alternatively, if the book is on the SD card, you can use the command:

ln -s /mnt/card/book.dat book.dat

to create a symbolic link in the current directory to the book.dat file on the SD card.  I just played a game against gnuchess with the default settings and qboard 1.1 as the graphical user interface.  I won, but after I checkmated, I could not save the game.  Qboard informed me that gnuchess was no longer running.  I then could not play another game until I rebooted.  Perhaps there is a memory leak somewhere.

You can test to see if the opening book is being used in qboard by switching sides in the Options menu to play as black, then play as white, then play as black, etc.  The opening moves should be recognizable.