Banksia GUI released

[phhnguyen]

There is an option in Chessbase to display unplayed transpositions in a CTG book, but when you play engine against engine matches it seems like Fritz ignores these moves.
I want Fritz to play these unplayed transpositions to, if they are good moves.
If I make a tree from the same games in Aquarium, and I export
the tree to EPD format, and then I import this EPD file back to the same tree, and choose the option 'generate moves'. This tree also contains the moves that are displayed as unplayed transpositions in the CTG book.

I have made a video capture of it so you can see what I mean.

... sp=sharing

I would like to be able to include these unplayed transpositions automatically in 'opening lines' in Lucas Chess. Or some other way to convert to pgn with these unplayed transpositions included.

Maybe if there would be a way to include these unplayed transpositions in a polyglot book somehow. And then import all the best moves from the bin book to the opening lines.
Because I think it is useful information.
If I make a repertoire based on the games of Magnus Carlsen for exemple.
I can always delete variations I don't want, but it is more work to find good variations to add.

I hope someone can help me with this.

Do you mean moves in the opening books with low scores/weights and be ignored when playing in tournaments?

BSG can play them all. In the below image when creating a new tournament, users can open this dialog to set up opening books. If they select a Polyglot book, they may change the percentage of "Top". 0% means always the best - BSG always picks up the moves with the biggest weights. 10% means from the 10% of the best moves, BSG will randomly take one. 100% means BSG ignores their weights and pick up randomly any available moves (for the given position) in the openings.



If you want to bring the Polyglot book to other chess GUIs for playing all moves, BSG can help by following ways:

• You can edit weights of all moves to make them have the same weight

• Export Polyglot books to PGN or EDP books. Those book formats have no weight

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.35 beta released

* Fixed bugs: 

• Can't select human for tournaments

• Can’t add current games to game databases

• ICS games did not show time

• Crashed if logging in both ICS and Local network

* Some small improvements/adjustments such as Human name in general; updated themes; use white/black colors to show players on Playing panel; add comment “forfeits on time” at the end of games…
* New features:  

• Can save tournament games to game databases

• Tournament results: Show result details for crossable

• Tournament results: show scores in percentages of the performance

• Tournament resign adjudication: an additional condition for lost materials

[JohnS]

Version 0.35 beta released

Excellent, thanks for the new version, the clocks on fics work. One minor problem - cant see engine names properly on fics engine menu because of black background.

https://prnt.sc/tw3h05

[AdminX]

I think there is a bug in LiChess Bot Challenges. They don't appear to be working from Banksia GUI. I can start them from the LiChess web interface of any browser however.

[Rom77]

phhnguyen, there are a couple of problems:

1. If you set a tournament with more than 10,000 games, then BSG starts to slow down significantly. The task manager shows that loading new games requires a full load of the entire processor core. The problem becomes even more serious on short time controls (and these are the controls that usually occur in tournaments with 10,000 games). Since the games are constantly loaded on short controls, I have to give one core completely to BSG. And this is too expensive for my four cores, since one more core must be given to the operating system.

2. If you start a tournament, then stop it and restart BSG, the tournament statistics will change:

Immediately after stopping the tournament:

Code: Select all

  #  name                                nodes/m         NPS  depth/m   time/m    moves     time
  1. Stockfish NN 2020-07-19 SV8.08-8        48K      622405     12.8      0.1     66.0      5.1
  2. Stockfish 2020-06-27                   101K     1336046     14.2      0.1     66.2      5.0
     all ---                                 72K      976807     13.5      0.1     66.1      5.1

After BSG reboot (tournament not continued yet):

Code: Select all

  #  name                                nodes/m         NPS  depth/m   time/m    moves     time
  1. Stockfish NN 2020-07-19 SV8.08-8        48K      698460     12.8      0.1     66.0      4.5
  2. Stockfish 2020-06-27                   101K     1541787     14.2      0.1     66.2      4.4
     all ---                                 72K     1111376     13.5      0.1     66.1      4.4

[Jonathan003]

There is an option in Chessbase to display unplayed transpositions in a CTG book, but when you play engine against engine matches it seems like Fritz ignores these moves.
I want Fritz to play these unplayed transpositions to, if they are good moves.
If I make a tree from the same games in Aquarium, and I export
the tree to EPD format, and then I import this EPD file back to the same tree, and choose the option 'generate moves'. This tree also contains the moves that are displayed as unplayed transpositions in the CTG book.

I have made a video capture of it so you can see what I mean.

... sp=sharing

I would like to be able to include these unplayed transpositions automatically in 'opening lines' in Lucas Chess. Or some other way to convert to pgn with these unplayed transpositions included.

Maybe if there would be a way to include these unplayed transpositions in a polyglot book somehow. And then import all the best moves from the bin book to the opening lines.
Because I think it is useful information.
If I make a repertoire based on the games of Magnus Carlsen for exemple.
I can always delete variations I don't want, but it is more work to find good variations to add.

I hope someone can help me with this.

Do you mean moves in the opening books with low scores/weights and be ignored when playing in tournaments?

BSG can play them all. In the below image when creating a new tournament, users can open this dialog to set up opening books. If they select a Polyglot book, they may change the percentage of "Top". 0% means always the best - BSG always picks up the moves with the biggest weights. 10% means from the 10% of the best moves, BSG will randomly take one. 100% means BSG ignores their weights and pick up randomly any available moves (for the given position) in the openings.



If you want to bring the Polyglot book to other chess GUIs for playing all moves, BSG can help by following ways:

• You can edit weights of all moves to make them have the same weight

• Export Polyglot books to PGN or EDP books. Those book formats have no weight

No I don't mean this.

If I make a bin book from the pgn games these 'unplayed transpositions' will not be in the bin book. It's something unique for the CTG format from Chessbase, and also openings trees from Aquarium.
I hope it can be implemented in bin books somehow.
Maybe it is better to make a new book format, that can do al this and can easily be converted to pgn lines.
I tried to make my point with the video capture. I understand the video is long, and not very to the point. I'm bad in video editing, I will try to make a more clear video with voice comments and maybe text balloons.
Export bin to pgn doesn't work for me with Banksia. A lot of lines are not there like I explained before.
I have best results for exporting a bin book to pgn with Lucas ChessR. By making a bin book with the settings uniform for one color. And than importing all best moves for that color from the bin book to opening lines. And afterwards I export this new opening lines to pgn in Lucas ChessR. It takes a long time in Lucas ChessR but it does a decent job.
Afterward I import end export the pgn in Chess Opening Wizard, to limit the number of games while preserving all unique opening lines.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.35 beta released

Excellent, thanks for the new version, the clocks on fics work. One minor problem - cant see engine names properly on fics engine menu because of black background.

https://prnt.sc/tw3h05

Thanks a lot for the report. It has been fixed for the next release

[phhnguyen]

I think there is a bug in LiChess Bot Challenges. They don't appear to be working from Banksia GUI. I can start them from the LiChess web interface of any browser however.

Did it work before?

I have just tried today, it seems be fine on my computer. Remember to check on the names of players you want to challenge and verify other parameters.

[phhnguyen]

Thanks a lot for the report.

phhnguyen, there are a couple of problems:

1. If you set a tournament with more than 10,000 games, then BSG starts to slow down significantly. The task manager shows that loading new games requires a full load of the entire processor core. The problem becomes even more serious on short time controls (and these are the controls that usually occur in tournaments with 10,000 games). Since the games are constantly loaded on short controls, I have to give one core completely to BSG. And this is too expensive for my four cores, since one more core must be given to the operating system.

Interesting issue! Frankly speaking, I am so rare to create such that huge tournament.

Can you give me a few more info:
- what is your OS, CPU and RAM? How many threads does it have?
- did you let BSG shows all playing games or watching games via Playing games panel?

On my computer, an Intel i7 4 cores 8 threads 16 GB RAM I can run normally a tournament of 10k games 40/8+1, 4 concurrencies, all logs turned on, showing all 4 playing games. I don't set higher concurrencies since still working on that computer.

If you see bad lagging, you may try to turn off some logs (say engine logs), turn off showing playing games. I agreed with you to let at least one core/thread for the system since BSG displays and updates a lot of information when a tournament playing.

The most effective chess interfaces in terms of using computing power should be command-line chess tournament managers since they don't need computing powers/memory for graphics at all. For BanksiaGUi it is Banksia (https://github.com/nguyenpham/Banksia). It is designed to work directly with all JSON files of BanksiaGUI. Thus after creating a tournament, you may quit BSG and start Banksia to complete it. Unfortunately, at the moment I did not update Banksia (so lazy ) thus it may not understand some tournament modes/functions. I will work to improve Banksia soon.

2. If you start a tournament, then stop it and restart BSG, the tournament statistics will change:

Immediately after stopping the tournament:

Code: Select all

  #  name                                nodes/m         NPS  depth/m   time/m    moves     time
  1. Stockfish NN 2020-07-19 SV8.08-8        48K      622405     12.8      0.1     66.0      5.1
  2. Stockfish 2020-06-27                   101K     1336046     14.2      0.1     66.2      5.0
     all ---                                 72K      976807     13.5      0.1     66.1      5.1

After BSG reboot (tournament not continued yet):

Code: Select all

  #  name                                nodes/m         NPS  depth/m   time/m    moves     time
  1. Stockfish NN 2020-07-19 SV8.08-8        48K      698460     12.8      0.1     66.0      4.5
  2. Stockfish 2020-06-27                   101K     1541787     14.2      0.1     66.2      4.4
     all ---                                 72K     1111376     13.5      0.1     66.1      4.4

Look like it is an issue of updating/caching information. Will fix for the next release. Thanks.

[Nordlandia]

I was thinking about something like this may be a neat solution.

"Syzygy engine path" and "Syzygy adjudication path" is probably fine.

Tooltip ideas:

• It is recommended to store syzygy egtb on a fast SSD.

• As adjudication only need single probe at root position. HDD/Mechanical hard drive is sufficient.

See -