Hello.

I am sorry, but I am not very computer literate. I did want to try playing Pachi on my computer. I downloaded the Windows program and installed it using GoGui.

In the "Read Me" file, it says that you can make Pachi play using an opening book and also to change some parameters. How do I do this? I see the commands that I should use, but where do I type this in?

Again, sorry if this is such an obvious question. But I do not know anything about computer programs or coding.

Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

In the gogui program menu, click "New Program" and enter the pachi command along with any parameters you want to pass to it. Make sure the directory points to wherever the pachi executable is located.

Thanks for your help. But I must be an idiot. I still can't get it to work.

Here's what I did. I downloaded the Fuego openings book and put it in the same directory as pachi.

Then I went to "New Program" and entered the command as:
./pachi -f book.dat
(just as the Read Me says)
Then for working directory, I typed in:
C:\Program Files (x86)\pachi-11.00-win32\

When I click "OK," I get this error:
The Go program could not be executed (Cannot run program "./pachi" (in directory "C:\Program Files (x86)\pachi-11.00-win32": CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified). Please correct the command for executing the program."

Help? What am I doing wrong?

The error message is very clear in that it could not find the file, even if you correctly spelled the full path. I remember that some older programs under windows could not cope with "fancy" pathnames containing empty spaces or brackets etc. A possibility is to revert to old 8-letter DOS style path names. Program Files (x86) should translate to something like progra~1 or progra~2 (i.e. the first 6 letters and then tilde+number. On my laptop, it is actually progra~2). Maybe you could try to change the working directory to

C:\progra~2\pachi-11.00-win32

or even

C:\progra~2\pachi-~1

Edit: Another possibility is that gogui does not like the Linux style "./pachi" - maybe try just "pachi" or "pachi.exe" (with extension) instead.

Thank you very much for your help!

You are welcome. Just in case if other readers have the same problem with pachi / gogui: could you post if it now works for you and how exactly the problem got solved? Many thanks in advance.

After reading your post, I thought about what command it was looking for. So to attach the openings book, I typed this in the command:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\pachi-11.00-win32" -f book.dat

It seems to be working. I may be wrong. But Pachi seems to be playing more "normal" or "human-like" openings.

Pachi is the strongest go playing software so far for me. This is what I put for the command in Gogui.

C:\PPDownload\pachi-11.00-win32\pachi.exe -f book.dat -t _1800 threads=2,max_tree_size=2500

Note that the Pachi windows binary is compiled for 32 bit windows and it has limited memory addressing range. Thanks to a post here, I used a utility app 4gb_patch to patch the pachi.exe, so that it can access up to 4 Gbytes of address range on my 64 bit Windows. I also downloaded patterns.prob and patterns.spat and that also makes pachi stronger. Without the patterns pachi always likes to play on the second line of the board in the beginning of the game, which doesn't make sense.

I have a not top-end, but reasonably fast CPU, AMD Athlon II X2 250 3GHz. I can play with pachi giving it 2 stone handicaps. So I guess it is about 1k in KGS. Of course a faster CPU will make it stronger.

Paths with spaces have generally to be put into quotes "", that was the problem here, because in command lines the OS can otherwise not know, what is the command part and what is the argument part. The abbreviations like "progra~1" are just for old days 8.3 compatibility and not in all cases turned on...
OP has solved it I think. General hint: You get a full and correct path to any object to the clipboard if you shift+rightclick file in explorer, "Copy as path".

Thanks! I'll try that out.