Please indicate clearly that your shareware fee is for Explorer 3.3.
Explorer uses the Smart Game Board interface. For a description of this interface, see the Thesis of Anders Kierulf, or the Smart Game Help stack included on this disk.
Last minute changes:
• The pricing information in the stack is no longer accurate. Smart Game Board and Explorer have gone shareware.
• Telephone numbers have changed (see above)
Additional Explorer Features not documented on the Smart Game Help stack:
• Explorer can be started with one Megabyte of RAM, but will soon run out of memory. Therefore 2 Megabyte are required (and sufficient) for playing.
• Explorer has about 170 components in its evaluation function. You can look at the total evaluation for each point on the board, and after that see the detailed evaluation for a particular move.
• Show Move Values (or Command-U) shows an evaluation of all moves. Note that all values are divided by 10. Values bigger than 999 are truncated on a small board, e.g. 503 is displayed as '50'. 1234 is unfortunately displayed as '23'. You can see the full value by making the board bigger, or by using Show Move Motives.
• Show Move Motives (or Command-Y) works only in the following two cases:
- If Show Move Values has been executed on the previous move
- If asked immediately after an Explorer move.
These and other displays are available through the Test menu. All other entries in the Test menu are either disabled or supplied without any warranty. Don't complain if using them shows unexpected effects. You are warned!
About game collections
----------------------
The games on this disk are supplied as game collections: many games are combined in one file. The concept is described in detail in the thesis: A. Kierulf, "Smart Game Board: a Workbench for Game-Playing Programs, with Go and Othello as Case Studies", Ph.D. thesis, ETH Zürich, May 1990.
A few pointers to help you along:
• Use the Next and Previous buttons in the game-info dialog to look in detail at the information about each game, and the Goto-button in the game-info dialog to go to the game currently shown.
• Use the command "Game Collection" in the View-menu to show the game collection window.
• In the game collection window, you can click with the mouse to do the following:
- leftmost column: Select one or more games. These can be deleted or transferred to other collections with Cut/Copy/Paste.
- middle columns: Restrict ("filter") the games according to one player: only games of that player are shown.
- rightmost column: Click here to skip directly to that game.
Use Filter in the Games-menu for more specific ways to restrict the set of games.
All games in a game collections can be merged into one tree of moves (a multi-game) with command Merge in the Games-menu. All games that start the same way share the same tree until they diverge; the game info is stored at the nodes where a game diverges. This is useful to study openings as played in various games. With Filter, the set of games in a
multi-game can be restricted to only that start with the current opening.
Merged games can be split into individual games again (although they are still all part of a single file, a game collection), but some information may be lost in the process.
