Sjeng — You did give me some pleasure
After packaging and running tournament among various chess engines (Crafty, Phalanx, Gnuchess), Sjeng is the most interesting out of all (of course I mean the old Sjeng Free, not Deep Sjeng).
It invariably loses every game, and suffers humiliatingly. Yes, I did add opening book for sjeng, and that’s still so. Seems it blunders like less powerful chess engines do:
- Exchanges most powerful (queen here) piece with 2 less powerful ones, but with no gain of positional or material advantage at all. And just in the middle of the game! At later stage this proves to be fatal…
- When there are no obvious good move, it just plays dumb moves instead of attempting to break through.
- Don’t know how to resign, like gnuchess do.
But watching sjeng playing these silly moves did give me some joyful time.
Did you remember how you added a book to free sjeng? I’m also having a look at the “personality” of different engines but I wasn’t able to have sjeng using a book. Thanks
Wow, it’s such a long time ago, I only had vague memory about that. Basically, you need to get a fairly large PGN file that covers gameplays of masters and/or grandmasters, and use
sjengto convert PGN into a binary book that onlysjengcan read, using the ‘book‘ command insidesjeng. The full procedure can be found inside the relevant Mandriva Linux RPM package. If you still don’t get anything sensible, you’re welcome to ask me again and I can provide you some more detail.