Playing with a text interface

1. Start a command prompt (Windows) or a shell (Linux).
2. cd where the SAI executables is - for instance, if you are in Windows and have followed the instructions in How to install, the command is cd c:\sai.
3. Launch SAI text interface with a command like sai -w <yournetworkfile>.gz --noponder -p 0 -v 1000 (Windows) and ./sai -w <yournetworkfile>.gz --noponder -p 0 -v 1000 (Linux), where .gz is the name of the network downloaded from http://sai.unich.it (put it in the same directory as SAI executables).

Invoking sai /help (Windows) and sai --help (Linux) will show SAI help, where you can find the meaning of command-line options.

In order to use SAI text interface, there are a handful of standard GTP commands that you should get used to. For example: play b c3 (put a black stone in c3), genmove w (let SAI play the best move for white), go (play the best move), komi -10.5 (set a 10.5 komi for black), list_commands and exit (guess what they do). More GTP commands and details here.

To play on a 9x9 board, you need to edit the configuration file sai/src/config.h before compiling, and download a strong network available here. If you installed SAI via Windows binaries, just run the script sai9x9.bat.