How can I create my own .abk opening book?

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Avatar of Remi1771

I want to create a .abk opening book. I also want to know other easy ways of creating opening books. Any good way? Someone knows how to program a.abk file? Any examples?

Avatar of rooperi

Yeah, there's a program, I've forgotten what it is, though. Hang on, let me search....

Avatar of rooperi

I just remembered, it's called poliglot, lemme see if I can find a link

Avatar of rooperi

http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/details1/PolyGlot.html

Avatar of EscherehcsE

I'm not an opening book expert, but I don't see how a polyglot adapter can be used to create an abk book. I think it will allow you to use a polyglot book in Arena, if that's what you want to do.

I did find this tutorial (although it looks like the tutorial was made in 3 minutes). Smile

http://www.chess2u.com/t4215-how-to-make-abk-book-arena-step-by-step-tutorial

Avatar of watcha
EscherehcsE írta:

I'm not an opening book expert, but I don't see how a polyglot adapter can be used to create an abk book. I think it will allow you to use a polyglot book in Arena, if that's what you want to do.

I did find this tutorial (although it looks like the tutorial was made in 3 minutes.

http://www.chess2u.com/t4215-how-to-make-abk-book-arena-step-by-step-tutorial

When I last tried Arena had a nice bug in its book handling system. If you created a book manually with Arena it could not handle transpositions in a correct way. I don't know if this bug has been fixed but be very careful. This was the main reason I looked for other chess interfaces. Now I'm using Aquarium which comes with a good book and handles transpositions correctly.

Avatar of Remi1771

Arena still has that glitch and some others, the polyglot doesn't work for books, I'll try with Aquarium

Avatar of Remi1771

Aquarium is paid, any free options?

Avatar of watcha

In fact I got sick and tired of chess GUIs that don't do what I want.

I have an own GUI written in Perl, it has a book that can handle transpositions properly ( it can even build a book using engine output ). The only unfortunate thing is that it requires some non core Perl modules which makes it less portable - so to try it you have to make some effort installing Perl ( not too difficult ) and the required modules ( difficult for someone not well versed in Perl ).

Here is a screenshot:

Avatar of Remi1771
watcha wrote:

In fact I got sick and tired of chess GUIs that don't do what I want.

I have an own GUI written in Perl, it has a book that can handle transpositions properly ( it can even build a book using engine output ). The only unfortunate thing is that it requires some non core Perl modules which makes it less portable - so to try it you have to make some effort installing Perl ( not too difficult ) and the required modules ( difficult for someone not well versed in Perl ).

Nice! How's it called? How do I obtain it/install it?

Avatar of watcha

Look, this program was intended for my personal use solely.

Still, you can obtain it here:

https://github.com/tkgui/chessgui

Installing it, well this is not that easy.

You need Perl to be installed on your computer with all the modules that my program uses. Installing Perl is easy ( there are distributions with installers like ActivePerl, Strawberry Perl, etc. ). Installing the modules, especially the Tk module ( which provides the graphical user interface ) requires expertise in Perl. Also note that currently the program uses the Windows clipboard module, so the only platform it runs on is Windows.

Once Perl and the modules are installed, to install the program you download the repository from GitHub and unzip it, to run it you simply click on chessgui.pl in the root directory of the repository.

I only recommend to fool around with this program for people who have experience with Perl.

Avatar of watcha

I'm currently converting my program to Java.

By now I managed to equip it with a book in which you can manually set move annotations ( transpositions are not a problem, because move values are linked to fens rather than move sequences ).

The only thing you need to run it is the latest version of Java installed on your computer.

You can obtain it here:

https://github.com/javachessgui/javachessgui

Screenshot from setting annotation:

Avatar of watcha

I made the first step toward Aquarium style deep analysis. Now the program can analyze a position by making all the moves in the position one by one and evaluate the resulting position. The evaluations are recorded and the moves are sorted accordingly. This way you get a full picture of the position, and this is persistent ( the evaluations are remembered and become part of the book ). Also to every move you can find the engine's best answer by clicking on it.

If you don't like the engine's evaluation, you can annotate the moves and this takes precedence in ordering:

Avatar of Remi1771

Omg incredible work! When will it be available to the public? 

Avatar of watcha

It is already available:

https://github.com/javachessgui/javachessgui

Avatar of Remi1771

Yayyyyy (it's a happy face)

Avatar of BigInteger

Is there an option to change the time of the deep analysis? I searched in the java files. And I see the thread.sleep option. But when I compile the files it's a small file. Not like the javachessgui.jar file. And I love your program wink.png