Setting up CrazyAra as a Lichess BOT

In the following we provide some additional information on how setup CrazyAra as a LichessBot using the official LichessBot bridge.

There are different options to let CrazyAra play more diverse in the opening.

• Temperature_Moves to allow sampling for the first given moves. The amount of randomness can by controlled via Centi_Temperature (higer values -> more randomness).
• Setting up an opening book to play the first few moves

Setting Up a Polygot opening book

A polyglot opening book can be enabled in the lichess-bot config.yml file.

  polyglot:
    enabled: true           # activate polyglot book
    book:
#      standard: "engines/book.bin" # book file path of standard chess
#      atomic: "atomic book path"
#      giveaway: "antichess book path"
      crazyhouse: "/path/to/book/crazyhouse_book.bin"
#      crazyhouse: "crazyhouse book path"
#      horde: "horde book path"
#      kingofthehill: "kingOfTheHill book path"
#      racingkings: "racingKings book path"
#      3check: "threeCheck book path"

If everything works, the bot should reply instantly when looking up book moves.

Generating a new polyglot opening book

You can generate a new opening book using the polygot exectuable:

• http://wbec-ridderkerk.nl/html/download.htm
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rskcUNoirPU

For generating an opening book for crazyhouse with a given pgn-file you can use for instance: polyglot make-book -pgn 1k_cz_lichess_startpos.pgn

However, you need to remove all dropping moves for crazyhouse in the pgn because this resulted in an error while parsing.

Avoid the engine to flag

BOT accounts have an additional overhead on lichess.org to reduce the amount of BOT vs BOT game traffic.

In order to avoid that the engine flags in short time controls, it is recommended to change the Move_Overhead(ms) UCI option in the config.yml file.

uci_options: {Move_Overhead: 500}

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Related issues #40, #135.