Author: John Merlino
Date: 18:03:08 06/08/01
Since the cat is definitely out of the bag now, I figure I might as well try to head off several potential posts addressed to myself (or e-mails to chessmaster@learningco.com -- or calls to Ubi Soft technical support) about problems that may arise when using The King outside of the CM GUI. (I should try to learn how to write shorter sentences....). So, here's a list of things that everybody should know: 1) You cannot use CM's opening books outside of the CM GUI. The King knows nothing about opening books, and all *.OBK book handling is done by the CM GUI. 2) According to the procedure outlined by Peter Berger, the magic "opk" value is supposed to change "every day". This is not true, as this value actually changes (or, is supposed to change) every MINUTE! So, basically, each opk value is probably only good once. 3) There is "a bug" in The King that is not apparent the CM GUI, but will be VERY IMPORTANT if you use The King against a human opponent on ICC or against a computer opponent that offers draws. In essence, if The King receives a "draw" command, it will IMMEDIATELY stop its search and you probably will not be able to get it started again! The upshot is that, if your opponent offers The King a draw, it is likely that The King will lose on time because it will never make a move after the request is received! This isn't a problem in the CM GUI, because the GUI handles all draw requests from humans (and WinBoard engines) internally -- The King never receives the draw request. But, this DID happen to me when I was playing with The King on ICC, so YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! There are ABSOLUTELY NO PLANS to fix this in a patch! 4) There are actually MANY values (other than "opk") that can be sent to The King on initialization. Basically, they tell the engine which personality settings to use. In most cases, sending the raw values that you see in the "Set Up Personality" dialog will result in undefined behavior. The GUI modifies the numbers that YOU enter into the numbers that The King expects. Of course, the easy way around all of this is to create a personality that you want to test, and then do the procedure that Peter Berger posted here, but taking note of ALL settings that are passed to the engine. You can then enter those into the initialization strings for your OTHER favorite GUI. ;-) jm
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