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tsito(1) General Commands Manual tsito(1) NAME tsito - XiangQi (Chinese Chess) SYNOPSIS tsito [-cxboard] [-red] [-blue] [-nobook] [-depth search-depth] [-ts hash- table-bits] DESCRIPTION Tsito plays XiangQi against the user or it referees two players. It can be used on the console (or an xterm) or can communicate through pipes to a GUI frontend. If used in a console it uses ASCII characters to display the board on the screen. COMMAND OPTIONS -cxboard Tells tsito that it is communicating to a GUI, not a user. Output is less user friendly and more pragmatically useful. -red Tells tsito to play red. -blue Tells tsito to play blue; the default. -nobook Tells tsito not to use an opening book. -depth search-depth Tells tsito the maximum depth to use for searching the game tree. More means better play but slower responce. -ts hash-table-bits Tells tsito how many bits to use for indexing in the transposition table. The size of the table will be 2^hash-table-bits elements wide. COMMANDS MOVE_TEXT Moves can be entered at the prompt in place of commands. These moves are interpreted as the user's move and are made up of exactly 2 sets of 2 characters without any spaces. Each set of characters represent a square on the board, with the first set being the origin and the second being the destination. Ranks are labeled by numbers from 0-9 and files are letters from a-i; character sets are composed of file followed by rank. Moves are not case sensitive. Example: h2e2 - This is the common opening move of red's right can- non moving to the center of the board. cxboard Tell tsito to start talking to a GUI. console Tell tsito to start talking to a human. red Tell tsito that the human player is red, tsito will play blue. blue Tell tsito that the human player is blue, tsito will play red. force Enter force mode; computer plays niether color and only checks en- tered moves for legality. sd depth Use max depth of 'depth' for search tree. post Display thinking. nopost Stop displaying thinking. vomit Prints the starting position, the current position, and entire move history for the current game to stderr. go Tell the engine to start playing the side to move. force Place the engine into 'force' mode. Engine plays neither side but acts as a referee. undo Take back the last move. This command is only available in force mode. remove Take back the last two moves - in other words take back YOUR last move. This command can be used in any mode. ? If the engine is thinking about its next move this command forces it to make a move right now. st seconds Sets the count in seconds available for each side to make a single move. Counter is reset each time a legal move is made. If either side runs out of time during their move then the game is lost. time Shows the time available. t Shorthand for the 'time' command. new Resets the board to the default starting position and starts a new game. setboard cfen Sets the board based on the supplied 'cfen' notation position de- scription and starts a new game. The supplied argument must match the 'CFEN' description below. set option value Sets engine specific option to value. ENGINE SPECIFIC OPTIONS search value Sets the search method to use for finding computer moves. Available values are: mtd - Very fast but not particularly stable (as in some- times makes questionable moves). alphabeta (default)- Slow but very stable. negascout - Medium speed, questionable stability. nullmove on/off If this option is on (default) then the engine will use null moves to speed up the search. verifynull on/off If this option is on (default) then tsito will increase the null move reduction factor and verify all null move cutoffs. This in- creases search stability at some cost to the speed gained by the null move. hash on/off If this option is on (default) then tsito will use a transposition table to greately reduce the amount of search nodes that must be evaluated by saving calculations already made and using those values if the same position is found again. hashadjust If this option is on (off by default) then when tsito finds a posi- tion that it has seen before but has not search to the depth it wants to now it will adjust the alpha-beta window to try and in- crease cutoffs. This can cause some conflicts with null moves and is considered an unstable option. This option has no effect if the search method is mtd. iterative If this option is on (default) then tsito will search depths incri- mentaly so that moves are ordered better. It is actually faster to search to each depth up to max depth instead of just searching to max depth the first time. CFEN CFEN is my own version of the standard FEN notation altered to represent a chinese chess position. Like FEN it consists first of a string of charac- ters representing the layout of the board. This string starts at a9 and stops at i0 (blue to red, left to right from red's side). Emty spaces are represented by integers that count how many consecutive spaces are empty. Pieces are represented by their respective character, blue is lower case whereas red is uppercase. Each rank is separated by a '/' character and space counts do not span multiple ranks. Folowing this layout description is a space followed by a 'b' or 'r' representing the side to move. Since there are no castling or en-pasant rights in chinese chess, these are not implemented. The half move count is also ommited. Example: r2Rka1hr/4a4/e3e3c/p1p1C1p1p/9/6P2/P1P1P3P/2H3H1E/3RA4/1cEK1A3 r Pieces: Pp - soldier (pawn) Cc - canon Rr - cart (rook) Hh - horse Ee - elephant Aa - guard (advisor) Kk - general (king) SEE ALSO The command set used in tsito is modeled after the xboard protocol by Tim Mann, which can be viewed at http://www.tim-mann.org/xboard/engine- intf.html BUGS When using null window search methods like mtd and negascout then sometimes a null move can end up in the primary line. This happens rather often and on not so rare occasions it effects the search poorly. The only way to get rid of the bug is to either not use these search methods or turn off null move heuristics. I decided to leave that up to you, the user. If you find that it is often making stupid moves and you are beating it regularly be- cause of this, try turning null moves off or using alphabeta as the search method. You may need to lower the search depth if you do this. Using null move verification does help quite a bit but does not get rid of the problem all together. AUTHORS This man page writen by Noah Roberts The origional tsito XiangQi engine was written by Noah Roberts as part of his senior project while enroled in the Computer Science department at St. Martin's College and Abby. The other members of the team, Scott Christian and Anthony Czyk, contributed related works including a Win32 GUI and docu- mentation. tsito(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | COMMAND OPTIONS | COMMANDS | ENGINE SPECIFIC OPTIONS | CFEN | SEE ALSO | BUGS | AUTHORS
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