Evaluation Houdini

Hi all,

I'm using WinBoard & Houdini 1.5. The evaluation Houdini gives is not for white, but for the side to move. So in a winning position it changes constantly from -3 to +3 to -3 etc.

Does anyone know how to change it? I couldn't find it in the options..

I recall having this problem many years ago.  View this page and scroll down to the Point of View Engine Scores section, which mentions this. 

In your winboard.ini configuration file, what you want to do is...

... set your absoluteAnalysisScores variable to true
... set your ScoreWhite variable to true

/absoluteAnalysisScores=true
/scoreWhite=true

(I think.  It's been awhile.  I don't use WinBoard as much anymore.)

Anyway, play around with that and let me know if that works.  And I agree... you really want to know the evaluation from White's point of view, always.  That's ideal, to me.

Hi Mr Collins,

Thanks for helping! The site looks very helpful for understanding the program; unfortunately my problem is not yet solved..

The variables /absoluteAnalysisScores and /scoreWhite are not in this winboard.ini file; when I add the lines you gave and save it, the whole program Winboard won't open anymore :(

Your link says about this topic: "Two options have been added..."

I think this refers to some update, while I might have an older version now. I'll download the newest version and see what happens.

Ah, I should have asked you what version you had. 

Even I don't have the VERY latest version.  But yes, by all means, download the very latest version.  (But I think you would have had to have had a VERY old version for that not to work.  But probably... because the older versions didn't recognize that switch.)

Update:  You can ignore much of what I wrote earlier. 

I just downloaded the most recent version of WinBoard.  It's changed a bit from the last version I have.  And the winboard.ini file you need to update is probably located in your users\yourname\AppData\Roaming folder, and it's probably called winibard47.ini.

(I'm starting to remember that with the last version I had, I saw no need for this ini file to be located here, so I came up with a work-around, I guess, and just had all of my options in my winboard.ini file located in the winboard folder.)

But yes, these values appear to be set to false by default, I I'm pretty sure you need to set them to true.  (They should be true by default, in my opinion.)