This program is useful only to people who have access to Batch Analyzer for doing top-3 analysis. It is being distributed under GPL version 3.

INSTALLATION

The installation is not particularly user-friendly, but here we go:

You need to install a Tcl interpreter on your computer first.  ActiveTcl Community Edition is available from here for non-commercial use:

http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/downloads

Read this before downloading:

http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/license-agreement

This program requires Tcl version 8.5 or better.  The installation is straightforward under both Windows and OS X: download the thing, double-click what you downloaded, and follow the instructions.  Under Linux it is a bit more involved, but after unpacking the downloaded tar archive and reading the instructions therein, all should be clear.  

Be sure to install Tcl BEFORE proceeding further.  The windowing Tcl shell is called "Wish."

To make things easier, put this file (ba2csv.tcl) in your home directory, .e.g, C:/Users/ under Windows or in /Users/ under OS X.

Under Windows, double-click this file.  It should start up the Wish program automatically and present a graphical interface that should be quite obvious.

If you're using Mac OS X, start the "Wish 8.5" application from the Applications->Utilities folder.  It should produce a main window named "Wish" and another named "Console".  In the console, type the following, assuming you put this file as suggested above:

source ~/ba2csv.tcl

The "Wish" window title should change to say "PostAnalyzer version 0.9".  At this point, you can minimize the console and use the controls in the main window to load output from Batch Analyzer and extract the data that is needed for accurate analysis.

Alternate way of starting under OS X: From the Applications->Utilities folder, start Terminal application.  Type this in the resulting window:

./ba2csv.tcl

The program will start, but without the consle window.

OPERATION

1) Click the Read BA output from ... button and select the file with the output produced by the Batch Analyzer.

2) Click the Folder for CSV results ... button and make or select empty folder where the results should go.

3) Adjust the winning position threshold as needed (100 cp minimum).  This will remove from the analysis any postions where one side's advantage is at least this many centipawns.

4) Select the number of non-book moves to discard from the analysis.

5) Decide what to do with positions where the Batch Analyzer did not wait for the engine to complete all four top PVs to the same depth.  You can either:

• discard such postions
• accept those postions where valuations are monotonic
• re-order move choices to be monotonic (this changes the top-x matches).

Usually, there are very few moves that might need reordering.

6) Click the Parse Batch Analyzer results and save CSV button.