Get Nissy

In this page you can find download links (see above), installation instructions and upgrade instructions for nissy. If instead you wish to clone the git repository, you can use git:

git clone https://git.tronto.net/nissy

For a summary of changes and a list of older versions see below. Some versions (for example 1.0) are not available directly, but can be obtained from the git repository.

Installation

System requirements

A full installation of nissy requires about 3Gb of space, of which 2.3Gb are occupied by the huge pruning table for fast optimal solving, and running it requires the same amount of RAM. One can choose to never use this function and not to install the relative pruning table. There is an alternative (slower) optimal solving function that uses about 500Mb of RAM.

Windows

Try downloading and executing in a terminal the file nissy.exe, then follow the instructions in the Tables section below for installing the pruning tables. If nissy.exe does not work, you can try following the UNIX instructions in WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) or in a similar environment.

UNIX (Linux, MacOS, *BSD...)

Download the source archive (.tar.gz). Extract it with your favorite archive program, for example with

tar -xvzf nissy-VERSION.tar.gz

Open a terminal in the directory just extracted. If you wish, edit the Makefile to match your local configuration (this is usually not necessary, but you may want to change the PREFIX variable to change the installation path) and run

make

followed by

make install

Then ollow the instructions below to install the pruning tables.

Tables

Note: the version 2.0 at the end of the file name is only indicative. Later versionw will use the same tables, unless otherwise specified.

Nissy needs certain large tables to work. These tables are by default generated the first time they are needed (e.g the first time you ask to solve a certain step) and then saved to a file. Whenever these tables are needed again, nissy simply loads the corresponding file from the hard disk.

The very large table for optimal solving can take some time to generate (about 1.5 hours on my fairly old but decent laptop, using 8 CPU threads). In order to generate it you need at least 5Gb of RAM. All other tables are much faster.

You can ask nissy to generate all the tables it will ever need with the gen command. It is recommended to use more than one thread, if your CPU has them. For example, you can run:

nissy gen -t 8

to generate all tables using 8 threads. You can change 8 to any number your CPU supports, up to 64.

Alternatively, you can simply download all the tables and copy them into the correct folder (see manual page, ENVIRONMENT section). On UNIX operating systems this folder is either .nissy/tables in the user's home directory or $XDG_DATA_HOME/nissy/tables if the XDG variable is configured. On Windows it is the same directory as the nissy.exe executable file.

Upgrading

If you already have nissy installed and you want to upgrade to a more recent version, you can simply repeat the installation process:

• On Windows: simply replace nissy.exe with the new file with the same name.
• On UNIX systems: download the new version of the source code, extract it in a new folder and run make and make install again.

In all cases the table files do not need to be upgraded.

Version history

Nissy v2

Nissy v1

Nissy v1 was released in 2020. It was slow, full of bugs and the code was quite terrible. But in practice it got its job done most of the time.