Best chess gui

[hgm]

Please forgive me if my info is out of date, I haven't looked at Winboard for many years. One option that I would find attractive and that I don't think exists at the moment, is to be able to instruct each of the 2 engines involved in an engine match to play both sides of each opening chosen, before moving onto the next opening.

This is possible when the opening lines are dictated by a file (the -loadGameFile). Indicating a value -2 for the -loadGameIndex will make WinBoard step to the next line in the file after two games. These parameters can now also be set through the menus (now that you can start matches from the menu). There you have to tick checkboxes if you want to step and whether you want two games, because -1 and -2 were not accepted by Windows numeric input fields.

[hgm]

How do you get to the load engine screen I don't see that screen in winboard
What version of winboard has
that screen I have version 4.5

The WinBoard-4.5-TM version to which I posted the link in the other thread should have this as second item in the Engine menu, "Load Engine...".

[K I Hyams]

Please forgive me if my info is out of date, I haven't looked at Winboard for many years. One option that I would find attractive and that I don't think exists at the moment, is to be able to instruct each of the 2 engines involved in an engine match to play both sides of each opening chosen, before moving onto the next opening.

This is possible when the opening lines are dictated by a file (the -loadGameFile). Indicating a value -2 for the -loadGameIndex will make WinBoard step to the next line in the file after two games. These parameters can now also be set through the menus (now that you can start matches from the menu). There you have to tick checkboxes if you want to step and whether you want two games, because -1 and -2 were not accepted by Windows numeric input fields.

Thank you.

[Kohflote]

Hi all,

Some years back (2008??) I read that on different chess gui, the speed of chess engine is different. And under some chess gui there were lost on time but no lost on time under other chess gui.

Thus my question (variant) is: which chess gui is the most stable and the chess engine speed is the fastest?

Thank you,
Kah Huat, Koh

[hgm]

I am not really the best person to answer your main question, as Ineer use any other GUI other than WinBoard. I did notice, however, that stability is often mentioned by others as their reason forusing WinBoard.

That the speed of engines would differ on different GUI seems 100+% nonsense to me. BUT: some GUIs (incuding WinBoard) have options to set engine priority, and when engine priority is set low, and your system attempts to run other applications than just your engine, the engine might get less of the CPU. That of course has nothing to do with a defect of the GUI, but counts as a user error.

That brings me to the key point I want to make: an operating system running a GUI and one or more engines is a quite complex system, and to make them work togeter, even if you have the best of everything, requires expertise by the user. The user is in fact the key component, and often the weakest link. You have to understand the limitations of memory and CPU power to find optimal settings.

E.g. to get the best performance you want the (single) engine to use all the CPUs your hardware has, not less, but also not more. But then it leaves no spare CPU for the GUI, (because that would be wasteful), and although the GUI only needs very little CPU power, it needs it fast, and it might be delayed in getting it when the engine tries to monopolize all CPUs. This is why it is better to have an engine that uses all system resources run at lower priority than the GUI. OTOH, if you have other heavy-duty tasks (e.g. virus scanners) running at the same or higher priority as the engine, they might start to steal appreciable CPU power from it. So it all depends on your system, and standard settings cannot anticipate that.

In addition, if things are not working as desired, it is important to determine which component is to blame. Some engines have crappy time management,and exceed time. So if a GUI forfeits the engine, this is good. The GUI where you will not see time losses withthat engine will be a crappy GUI, because it does not properly punish engines that exceed time. But if it is your purpose not to see any time losses no matter how badly an engine exceeds its time, a strict GUI like WinBoard can also do that by switching the auto-flag option off. So leaving it on in such a case, would again count as a user error, not as a GUI defect. And of course the whole time-loss issue could be neither the fault of the engine or the GUI, but a result of improper setting of process priorities for the particular conditions on your computer as a whole.

[poisonedpawn]

surprised that fritz isn't more popular. IMO it is by far the best.

[Karol Majewski]

surprised that fritz isn't more popular. IMO it is by far the best.

Too buggy for me. Under Windows 7 64-bit, F12 GUI crashes regularly when I load engine parameters from file. My vote goes for Shredder.

[hgm]

And one little thing to you, Harm-Geet. WB would be much more attractive to me if it could play many-round gauntlets so that in each round it plays all opponents once, then starts round 2 with the first opponent (this is called carousel I think).

This is already possible: In the Tournament dialog (shown a few postings above) you can set both a number of games per pairing and a number of 'cycles'. So you can get a carousel where each participant meets each other 10 times by specifying

games per pairing = 1
cycles = 10

In that case alternate cycles will reverse the color assignment, and if you have specified a file with starting positons with auto-increment, cycle 1 will use the first, cycle 2 the second, etc. (Or, if you specified two games perposition, cycle 1 and 2 will use position 1, cycle 3 and 4 position 2, etc.)

You could also play the games in pairs, by setting

games per pairing = 2
cycles = 5

Any combination is possible. Games per pairing gives the number of times two players play each other consecutively, and the number of cycles how often the entire round-robin scheme is repeated.

Btw, replacing an engine by another in WinBoard is not that difficult, although not supported by the menus. You can simply stop the tourney (kill WinBoard), edit the tournament file, replacing the name of one of the participants by another (which had better be installed in WinBoard under that name!), and then restart the tourney (by clicking the tourney file). The new engine will then play the remaining games of the engine it replaced.

[Roger Brown]

I guess people just remember the old ugly days and start sweating in panic if they just give it another try they make like it now.

Exactly. WinBoard has become much easier to use over the years. I suggest everyone to try it and go through its menus and possibilities. I am sure they will be pleasantly surprised. There is practically no command line work to do now.

For me it is odd that almost all GUI's suffer from one (in my eyes) serious flaw: after you have created and started a tournament there is no way to interrupt it, modify it (by removing or adding engines) and then resume it. Neither Shredder nor Fritz can do it. However, Arena can, and this feature alone makes it the most attractive to me. Of course, from a tester's point of view.

And one little thing to you, Harm-Geet. WB would be much more attractive to me if it could play many-round gauntlets so that in each round it plays all opponents once, then starts round 2 with the first opponent (this is called carousel I think).

Hello Gabor,

H.G. has already spoken to the Winboard possibilities but I believe that ChessGui offers the possibility of swapping out opponents and continuing.

I seem to recall Matthias exploring that possibility some time ago but with my memory....

Later.

[Matthias Gemuh]

Hello Gabor,

H.G. has already spoken to the Winboard possibilities but I believe that ChessGui offers the possibility of swapping out opponents and continuing.

I seem to recall Matthias exploring that possibility some time ago but with my memory....

Later.

The feature is in ChessGUI, but I have never had feedback to confirm that it works !

Matthias.