Archived from groups: rec.games.chess.computer (
More info?)
In rec.games.chess.computer, wrote:
In article <26wOe.97$kf4.2221161@news.sisna.com>, Muggs wrote:
Hi!
> I'm trying to get better (as we all are) and I would like
> to use Arena and play one of the engines but have the
> engine always play the French main line, and then after a
> certain # of moves play normally.
>
> So...
>
> 1. is this possible?
Yes.
> 2. how whould I acomplish this?
The easiest way that comes into my mind is to just "shorten"
the opening book of your engine. As you use Arena I guess
you use some free engine like crafty. So the following
applies to crafty. It's different for other engines.
Now I'm not useing DOS, but even there you can start the
plain engine in a command line window. Actually you may read
from Arena's configuration dialogs where the engine in
question lives.
Fire up a cmd.exe go to that directory. Say you are using
crafty, then fire up the bare engine by issuing "crafty".
Now what have you won? You get a command line where you can
What will you do? To cite from the manual:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[...]
After creating book.bin, you need to create books.bin. This
is a small version of book.bin, which is intended to
give you more control over the moves/openings Crafty will
play. This is usual- ly built from the file start.pgn on
the ftp machine, but you can modify this file to suit your
taste easily. To build books.bin, you use the following
command:
books create start.pgn 60
Again, 60 is what I use, but none of my start.pgn lines go
any- where near that many moves. The main point here is
that in start.pgn, you can append a "!" to any move you
want, and when it is Crafty's turn to move for that color,
it will play from the set of moves with "!" if there are
any, ignoring the rest of the book moves. If you only want
it to play 1. e4 as white, you would just enter the
short game:
[Crafty only plays 1. e4]
1. e4!
and you are finished!. You can enter as many as you want.
[...]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
So, to conclude from this, you need a file let's call it
"french.pgn" for whatever reason, that is a plain text file
you can create with any editor (or notepad if you don't have
anything better at hand) that looks like this:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
[French Defense]
1. e4! e6! 2. d4! d5!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
You may add as many moves as you like to this file. The
notation seems clear? The ! forces crafty to play only this
move. (For simplicity I'll not go into details about the
other possibilites in this file. Please see the manual in
case this is not sufficient.)
Save it as french.pgn to the directory where crafty lives.
Then fire up the engine itself. (The crafty command
mentioned above) if you not already did it. You will get an
output similar to this:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
found computer opening book file [/opt/chess/share/crafty/bookc.bin].
Crafty 19.19 vs Wagner,Alexander
tellicsnoalias kibitz Hello from Crafty v19.19!
4 piece tablebase files found
1175kb of RAM used for TB indices and decompression tables
Audio output disabled
Loading personality file
/users/arwagner/GNUstep/Chess/Peronalities/crafty.cpf
Crafty v19.19
White(1):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
And now you issue after the "White(1):" prompt something like
----------------------------------------------------------------------
books create french.pgn 60
----------------------------------------------------------------------
That's it. Now crafty created some new file in that
directory and should always play the French. (To reset it to
it's default you have to recreate the books with no forcing
variations.)
--
Kind regards,
Alexander Wagner
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