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Sunsetter Notes and News
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Updated: 11:59 14.11.2003



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******** Can you help out a bit with ... 

-> can someone check whether it still compiles/run in Linux ? Especially the book building ? I dont know anything about Linux but there is a makefile included by someone who knows a lot more .. 

-> could someone profile the current version (running speedtest.bat). Remember this is a laptop, and I also only have the free AMD profiler which is, uhm, ahm, well free. 

-> also testing in GUIs I dont have is highly appreciated, does it run in ChessPartner for example ? Or Fritz8 ? 

-> just running "speedtest.bat" and "sppedtest-functions.bat" on your machine would also be quite interesting .. Sunsetter isnt as much faster on for example the RWBC computer than I expected. Maybe there is even someone with a 64bit machine and a compiler for it (we can talk about firstOne()) ? ;) 


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******* BOOK and TESTING : 

A short explanation what the .bat files supplied with Sunsetter do. To see the output of the operation, either run the file from command prompt, or, when you just double-click on them, look at the log-file (which is the newest txt-file in your Sunsetter directory). 

1. The ones for the book 

-> "makebook.bat" will incooperate all the games in a file called games.pgn in the same directory, into Sunsetters opening book. 

The more often it finds a position in the games, the more likely it is to be played. 
If you dont like that it plays 1.d4 all the time and think it would do better at 1.e4 , then create a games.pgn with just 1 game in it. Make it a game that starts with 1.e4 and add the comment "!!" to 1.e4 . 
Of course one can completely change and improve the book that way ... 
It also understands ?? , but not ? or just !

-> "exportbook.bat" outputs the book into a human readable format ! 

This will create a file book.pgn which you can load into Chessbase for example. Its a rather huge pgn with all the variations in it. I think its rather fun :-). 

-> "weedBook.bat" deletes positions played only 2 times or once, and performs some more maintainance stuff.

2. The ones for testing

-> "speedtest.bat" will analyse every position in the file speedtest.pgn to a given depth. Then it will output the number of nodes, and the time taken. That way I can compare the overall speed on different machines, if I would get some results back ... 

-> "speedtest-functions" will in a similar manner test the speed of certain functions (like generating moves) on your system. But tests should not take longer than 10 minutes, at the very longest. 

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******** Filenames:

The learning files will now have names according to the version eg. ss-4a.bin . This should make sure that in self play each version gets its own learning file. It also means that if you want to use the learned data from the previous version you have to rename the learn file.

The init files are now also named according to version, eg. version 14f would search for a ss-14f.ini .
The output files are called ss-14f+ timestamp.txt

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Feedback highly appreciated !

georg.von.zimmermann@law-school.de