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there are new updated version from Tornado and EnginMax available again!

on my site : http://sites.google.com/site/mychessengines/files

enjoy!

Hi Engin, thanks for the work you're doing on your engines. Unfortunately, Tornado 3.6.6 is losing some games by time forfeit. (32-bit compile running in Arena.) I haven't tried the 64-bit version. The time losses occur either with opening books or epd files, it doesn't seem to matter.

Arena is notoriously known for causing engines to run out of time even though the engine itself would have not on its own.

Make sure you always run tournaments in Arena with time increment.

What is worse, even those for some engines the effect is not that bad (as in they will not lose on time) the fact that Arena "eats" time can adversely influence how strong an engine plays therefore totally skewing any meaningful result.

I long ago gave up on Arena for anything related to deciding how strong an engine it. I still use for other purposes but I am always mindful of this shortcoming.

Regards,
Vlad.

vladstamate wrote:Arena is notoriously known for causing engines to run out of time even though the engine itself would have not on its own.

Make sure you always run tournaments in Arena with time increment.

What is worse, even those for some engines the effect is not that bad (as in they will not lose on time) the fact that Arena "eats" time can adversely influence how strong an engine plays therefore totally skewing any meaningful result.

I long ago gave up on Arena for anything related to deciding how strong an engine it. I still use for other purposes but I am always mindful of this shortcoming.

Regards,
Vlad.

So if you don't like Arena, which other GUI do you recommend for tournaments? Two others I considered but were avoiding were:

1)Winboard 4.4.3. I like the new engine configuration feature, but as far as I can tell, you still have to manually edit the winboard.ini file to install engines.

2)ChessGUI. This one is promising, but a don't like the fact that if you have a Winboard engine that doesn't have an ini or config file, he recommends that you use the wb2uci adaptor. (I absolutely HATE using adaptors. Too much tweaking required.)

Also, it seems that many engines don't really have a problem with losing time in Arena. (Or at least it seems many engines never have time forfeits in Arena.) Could it be that those programmers knwo something others don't know?

Jimbo I wrote: 2)ChessGUI. This one is promising, but a don't like the fact that if you have a Winboard engine that doesn't have an ini or config file, he recommends that you use the wb2uci adaptor. (I absolutely HATE using adaptors. Too much tweaking required.)

Using the wb2uci adapter is easy. You do need to be aware that you must insert command line parameters when necessary though (which isn't all that often).
Try ChessGUI. You won't be disappointed.

yes, thats right with Arena and without time increment its a problem NOT the engine it self

I use mostly the Shredder Chess Classic GUI, free for 30-days or buy it for very cheap cost under 30 €

Graham Banks wrote:

Jimbo I wrote: 2)ChessGUI. This one is promising, but a don't like the fact that if you have a Winboard engine that doesn't have an ini or config file, he recommends that you use the wb2uci adaptor. (I absolutely HATE using adaptors. Too much tweaking required.)

Using the wb2uci adapter is easy. You do need to be aware that you must insert command line parameters when necessary though (which isn't all that often).
Try ChessGUI. You won't be disappointed.

Actually I tried it before with a few engines, but when I thought about installing Phalanx Reborn (no ini or config file), I got frustrated and dumped everything. Maybe I'll try it again.

So Phalanx does use command line parameters. Do you somehow put the command line parameters in the wb2uci.eng file, or are they added via the GUI install?

Engin wrote:yes, thats right with Arena and without time increment its a problem NOT the engine it self

I use mostly the Shredder Chess Classic GUI, free for 30-days or buy it for very cheap cost under 30 €

OK, I'll either add an increment to Arena or switch GUIs. Thanks for getting back to me.

Jimbo I wrote:So Phalanx does use command line parameters. Do you somehow put the command line parameters in the wb2uci.eng file, or are they added via the GUI install?

Have a look in the ChessGUI readme file - Matthias has listed what you need to do for each engine.

When using the wb2uci adapters, I put the command line parameters in the exe name inside the folder. Here is an example:

[ENGINE]
Name=Dirty 6J-22
Author=Andres Valverde and Pradu Kannan
Filename=DirtyUci.exe

[OPTIONS]
Program=Dirty.exe -hash 128 -degbb G:\egbb -dcache 32

Graham Banks wrote:

Jimbo I wrote:So Phalanx does use command line parameters. Do you somehow put the command line parameters in the wb2uci.eng file, or are they added via the GUI install?

Have a look in the ChessGUI readme file - Matthias has listed what you need to do for each engine.

When using the wb2uci adapters, I put the command line parameters in the exe name inside the folder. Here is an example:

[ENGINE]
Name=Dirty 6J-22
Author=Andres Valverde and Pradu Kannan
Filename=DirtyUci.exe

[OPTIONS]
Program=Dirty.exe -hash 128 -degbb G:\egbb -dcache 32

Ah, I understand. It does look easy; I think I'll be able to get it working without any trouble. At least I hope so.

Thanks for the help, Graham