Ntest Modes

[g]ame mode

'g' mode plays a game or series of games.
The first character after the 'g' is the black player: 'h' for human, '1' for computer 1, '2' for computer 2.
The second character after the 'g' is the white player.
You may append a '*' to have the players alternate colors (if they are playing more than one game).

Examples:
 
gh2  human plays black, computer2 plays white
g11 self-play computer1
g12* play computer1 vs computer2, alternating colors

[G]ame+ edmund mode

'G' mode is like 'g' mode, but the game is edmundized while it is being added to book (see mode 'e' below for a description). Unlike edmund mode you do not need to negamax the book after using this mode.

[a]nalyze mode

'a' mode analyzes a game or series of games and adds it/them to computer 1's book.
The character after the 'a' is the game format:
 
g GGF format
i IOS format
k log/kitty format
l logbook format
m move list format "F5d6C3..."

For all game types except k, the games are read from standard input. In game type k the games are read from the file given after Ak, e.g. Ntest "Akc:\devl\othello". If an opening file is specified on the command line, only games matching that opening will be analyzed. A game matches the opening if any position in the game is a reflection of the position at the end of the opening file.

To analyze the games in mygames.ggf at a depth of 20, type:

Ntest Ag s20 < mygames.ggf

To save the output in analysis.txt so you can read it, type:

Ntest Ag s20 < mygames.ggf > analysis.txt

[A]nalyze+edmund mode

'A' mode is like 'a' mode but edmundizes each game after it is added to book. (see mode 'e' below for a description). Unlike edmund mode you do not need to negamax the book after using this mode.

[n]egamax mode

Checks computer 1's book for transpositions. This is done automatically anyway if the negamax flag is set in parameters.txt. This may mean additional searches need to be done to calculate deviations for all positions.

[e]dmund mode

Checks computer 1's book for Edmund nodes. These are nodes where the best deviation is better than the best played line in the WLD sense. It then plays a game from each of the found Edmund nodes. This process of playing new games can create new Edmund nodes, so if Edmund games were played it's good idea to run this mode again afterwards.

Optionally you can give an edmund mode after the 'e', for instance "NTest e7" is the most agressive mode and takes the longest. The edmund mode is a sum of the following flags:

If no mode is specified the default mode is 1 (Edmundize probable solve nodes, don't edmundize midgame nodes, and don't fill out the draw tree).

It is strongly recommended that you negamax the book before and after running this mode (setting the negamax flag for computer1 in params.txt will do this).

[i]nternet mode

Tells Ntest to play on the GGS server. To do this, create a file named "password.txt" with two entries. The first is the password that your version of ntest will use to play. The second is your login on GGS (not the bot's login - this is the login that will control the bot). For example, if password.txt contains socks smelly then the user "smelly" will control Ntest.

Then connect Ntest to the internet. Your version of Ntest will use the login (depth)(your name). smelly's version of s12 will play under the name s12smell - GGS logins are limited to 8 characters.

Example:

Ntest i s12

smelly logs into GGS and sees s12smell logged in. He tells s12smell

mso
ta 8 ant
If ant's available for a game, the game starts and smelly can watch. When s12smell has played enough games, smelly tells s12smell
quit
s12smell then logs out and quits (saving the book).

To build a book quickly you can run the program overnight on the internet. I suggest

	mso
	ts request +
	alias aa ts open 0; ts open 1; ta s8
	repeat 10 aa
which will set the program to accept generic challenges and challenge everyone on the server every 10 seconds.

[p]osvalues mode

Calculates values for captured.pos using computer 1 and stores the result in captured.pv. Will try to start where it left off if you use 'pa' instead of 'p'.

[!] Calculate MPC statistics

Generally a bad idea to overwrite the MPC files, don't use this option.

[?] Nuke Book entries

Removes all book entries with fewer than n empties. This reduces the size of the book if the book is getting too big, but obviously there can be problems if you chop off too much of the book.

The program will request the number of entries from the user. For s26 I chopped it off at 23 empties and the book size dropped about 40%.