cjug74 wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2026 4:13 pm
What should be the way to create a Tournament where each engine uses its own book?
I tried by checking the Own Book setting on some bundled Engines and choosing a blank slot in the Book option of the Tournament but it didn't work. The Engine logs "BOOK ENABLED" message when it boots up but it starts thinking on move 1, not using its book.
I had the same issue when trying that on an individual game.
yes, that's the correct way to do it - enable OwnBook (assuming it's an UCI engine) and select no book in the GUI, just tried and it works.
of course the GUI has no way of knowing if the engine actually uses own book or not - it'll only get bestmove from the engine,
whether is comes from a book or search the GUI has no way of knowing
note that the bundled cheng isn't packaged with a book, so it won't work
Thank you for the response Martin. As an update, the aforementioned issue happens to me only with bundled Eveann 5.0 engine. I continued to test the others (minus Cheng which I noted has no book with it) and they worked as expected, i.e., they use their book when Own Book option is checked.
So it seems it's a particular issue of Eveann engine.
cjug74 wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2026 4:13 pm
What should be the way to create a Tournament where each engine uses its own book?
I tried by checking the Own Book setting on some bundled Engines and choosing a blank slot in the Book option of the Tournament but it didn't work. The Engine logs "BOOK ENABLED" message when it boots up but it starts thinking on move 1, not using its book.
I had the same issue when trying that on an individual game.
yes, that's the correct way to do it - enable OwnBook (assuming it's an UCI engine) and select no book in the GUI, just tried and it works.
of course the GUI has no way of knowing if the engine actually uses own book or not - it'll only get bestmove from the engine,
whether is comes from a book or search the GUI has no way of knowing
note that the bundled cheng isn't packaged with a book, so it won't work
Thank you for the response Martin. As an update, the aforementioned issue happens to me only with bundled Eveann 5.0 engine. I continued to test the others (minus Cheng which I noted has no book with it) and they worked as expected, i.e., they use their book when Own Book option is checked.
So it seems it's a particular issue of Eveann engine.
Can happen because EveAnn book is huge and it is loaded in memory at start up, maybe it exceeds the accepted starting time.
In fact own book for EveAnn is used only for ICS connections (monthly tour and so on) , I didnt try it with cute/myracle.
EDIT : Anyway... do you happen to have it in a mechanical HD or a slow SSD ? Because I tried here and loaded ok
peter wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2026 10:53 pm
I still haven't managed to explain my intention, Martin. E.g. UHO exist in pgn- format and in epd both, but anyhow the collections of the positions are sorted in suites. If you want to understand fully, download one of the suites from the site of the link I gave above, leading to Stefan Pohl's download- site.
Each one position is stored as a single game, end- position of which is to be used as starting position of a single game in tournament and a second time to get a pair with exchanged colours if determined thus, but disregarding colour exchange, each one position for the same pair of engines is used just once, as long as not defined otherwise for more often repetitions of each and every single position of the suite. epd- suites work that way with CuteChess- GUI as well as .pgn- suites, as you'll probably know, the menue of the tournament mode of the GUI is "Opening suite" as alternative to "book" for starting the games. Giving in the path to such .pgn- suites or .epd- suites is one of the options in CuteChess- GUI, or you can get same mode giving in corresponding syntax to the command- line tool Cutechess (without GUI), regards
I think there's a slight misunderstanding Peter,
Myracle doesn't make a distinction between a book (polyglot) and pgn - it works exactly the way you describe (plus you can also limit the pgn openings by maximum ply) - so yes, one game is one opening, just as you describe. Myracle already does exactly that.
I guess the only problem here is wording - book vs suite.
in Myracle I treat both .bin and .pgn as books - so there's no suite, just book
Or perhaps you experience a problem setting up a pgn as a book?
Andres Valverde wrote: ↑Fri May 29, 2026 11:13 pm
Can happen because EveAnn book is huge and it is loaded in memory at start up, maybe it exceeds the accepted starting time.
In fact own book for EveAnn is used only for ICS connections (monthly tour and so on) , I didnt try it with cute/myracle.
EDIT : Anyway... do you happen to have it in a mechanical HD or a slow SSD ? Because I tried here and loaded ok
ok - I've removed the EveAnn book from the bundle as you requested
as a bonus the bundle is now 10mb smaller to download
Sorry for my thick-wittedness
I just should have given a try to loading an UHO- file (in .pgn- format) as a book, if I had done so from the very start, I had seen, that it works just the way it does in CuteChess- GUI with "opening suite" there
Thank you Martin for Myracle. It looks awesome! It's a pity IMHO that it is Windows-only, but fortunately it seems to work well under Linux, with wine.
May I know in which language it is written, and using which library?
Qui trop embrasse mal étreint.
Author of Eschecs, a simple UCI chess GUI written in Pascal.
build 58 is up:
- fix: xboard engine bogus pondering timeout
- a complete rewrite of analysis logic
- a couple of human-eng fixes
- optionally show thinking arrows for player engines
sure - it's written in C++ using my custom framework and a custom cpu sofware rasterizer for svg and fonts.
the only third party library I use is pyrrhic for syzygy, cheng board/movegen code naturally I don't consider third party
it already builds and runs on Linux, but it's not mature enough for a release, other platforms are low priority
at the moment as I'd have to invest a substantial effort to make it on par with the Windows version
First of all, thank you for sharing this. I really like the GUI. A tournament with eight participants ran without any issues. Engines from Franz’s excellent emulator can also be integrated without any problems, allowing them to play against each other.
I have one question: I’m running an analysis engine (Stockfish) in parallel. Would it be possible to display its evaluation directly in the diagram?
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to embed images here to illustrate this more clearly.
First of all, thank you for sharing this. I really like the GUI. A tournament with eight participants ran without any issues. Engines from Franz’s excellent emulator can also be integrated without any problems, allowing them to play against each other.
I have one question: I’m running an analysis engine (Stockfish) in parallel. Would it be possible to display its evaluation directly in the diagram?
Unfortunately, I don’t know how to embed images here to illustrate this more clearly.
Regards
Mark 1
I'm not sure what you mean - I guess you mean to show the analysis engine/kibitzer in the eval graph?
this is a bit tricky specially if you play multiple games in parallel, because there is always only one kibitzer (=analysis engine set)
that's always tied to current game in active tab, also if you switch tabs the position to be analyzed is switched too
and when you switch back later, there would be an ugly gap in the graph
so no, not possible at the moment and not planned
kibitzer graphs work on certain sites because they never play multiple games or multiple tournaments in parallel