Hello,Hugo wrote:I avoided to use the Fritz gui. Sometimes it is hard or impossible to resume tournamnts. Maybe it my fault, maybe gui.
In shredder GUI tournaments can be much better controlled and games resumed.
Just the live presentation is more effort.
best regards, Clemens KeckNordlandia wrote:Can i ask why Fritz GUI is avoided?
Arena 3.5.1 appears to have 4096 MB limit.
Many thanks for this well equipped tournament and my respect for you being privileged to use these strong but private engines. SMK seems to be the only one of the old superior commercial top-level league (Morsch, Schröder,de Koning, Ban, Uniacke, Donninger, Theron) who is still operating and can keep up to date. They never come back, does the same hold true for chess programmers? I think, many friends of computer chess will hope Stefan is well on the way to break that rule. With a new Shredder xx and a Houdini 5 it should be no illusion that the nasty Elo-gap between the super duo Komodo/Stockfish and the rest of the tests get plugged soon. Hold on!
Oh yes, GUIs are sometimes stubborn like donkeys or women..,ok, as some woman..,well, as some women I got to know so far in my life. You need them, you like them, you get used to them, you curse them. In the meantime I have made my peace with the GUIs, at least. I try to choose the best for a certain job, as like as you do, apparently.
However, everybody insists on his own curves of experience and learning. So I will take here the opportunity to fly the flag just for Fritz as my current favourite GUI. In my case it is Fritz 12.
Only a few important user friendly issues to me:
1. Proper and simple transfer of crosstabs to postings, in a breath
2. Bug forgiving. For instance, compared to Arena and Shredder Classic the really poisoned Black Mamba engine produces significantly less crashes in the Fritz environment. Don’t ask me why.
3. If a game doesn’t score ( crash, hang up) it will be automatically repeated when the tournament is started next.
4. The first time you start a tournament you get instantly created and shown a data file with all the coming engine pairings
5.If something went wrong with the tournament you have a lot of possibilities to keep the correct games and to put on a new part with the outstanding pairings. Ok, sometimes you have to be a little tricky.
6. During a tournament game you can permanently change the windows for watching the game, the scores and the crosstab
Not so ideal from my point of view:
First, an engine copy with changed parameters must always contain the original name. You may not abbreviate and so you get partly mad long engine names. I will post here soon, how this may have perfidious consequences for the user.
Second, in a tournament you can use the original engine and only one copy of it. To get more engines, representing different parameters, you had to fiddle.
Well, this shouldn’t be an objective comparative study but only a numeration of personal preferences. I’m rather sure there will come an Arena phase again. I like the open character of that GUI, you can build, adapt, adjust, configure and tune almost all what you want. And you are working with the handy and universal pgn-format ab initio, the troublesome back and forth converting to other formats isn’t necessary
Shredder classic is a proper, nice and stable GUI with a miserly database application. And Aquarium, ChessGUI, ChessX and a few more? Oh yes, but you cannot deal with everything.
rn
