Pedantic Developer's Log Stardate...

[rdhoffmann]

Yes it is set to UCI. I believe I also tried Winboard.

I didn't dive deeper into it, all I can say is it does not seem to react at all, ie. credits are not displayed. So just a rough guess, it crashes during initialization.

[JoAnnP38]

Yes it is set to UCI. I believe I also tried Winboard.

I didn't dive deeper into it, all I can say is it does not seem to react at all, ie. credits are not displayed. So just a rough guess, it crashes during initialization.

There was a bug in the initial executable for the 0.2 release that caused a problem in cutechess, but I have not heard any problems with Arena. I replaced the zip files in that the 0.2 release with ones labled 0.2.1. If you didn't download the latest zip file names Pedantic.0.2.1.Win64.zip
then you should try that. Otherwise, what happens when you just run Pedantic.exe from the command line outside of Arena?

For instance:

> Pedantic uci
Pedantic 0.2.0

>uci
id name Pedantic v0.2.0
id author JoAnn D. Peeler
option name OwnBook type check default true
option name Ponder type check default true
option name Hash type spin default 64 min 1 max 2048
option name Clear Hash type button
option name UCI_EngineAbout type string default Pedantic v0.2.0 by JoAnn D. Peeler, see https://github.com/JoAnnP38/Pedantic
option name Evaluation_ID type string default <empty>
option name Random_Search type check default false
option name Collect_Stats type check default false
uciok

[rdhoffmann]

The command line version seems ok. So it just crashes Arena and CuteChess (in fact CuteChess closes/crashes completely when I try to use Pedantic, while Arena can cope with crashing engines and does nothing).

[rdhoffmann]

Ok I figured it out, so it requires an extra manual command line param "uci"

This is very unusual, I don't know any other engine that would require this. Ihmo it should just work out of the box.

[lithander]

When adding the Engine to Cutechess under "Configure Engine" you have to put "pedantic.exe uci" in the Command field. Then it works for me.

Of course other engines don't usually require additional commandline paramters to work so I fear it creates a lot of friction with potential users.

Edit: rdhoffmann beat me to it by a minute!

[rdhoffmann]

To be fair 50% of engines crash left and right, especially engines <2000 ELO. I also haven't completely figured out the UCI protocol for my engine either, while I get it to work in tournament mode fine in both Arena and Cute Chess, static analysis fails in some cases. The UCI protocol as such is nice but the command line communication under Windows is a nightmare.

Anyway now I can run some games against Pedantic, should be fun

[JoAnnP38]

Of course other engines don't usually require additional commandline paramters to work so I fear it creates a lot of friction with potential users.

The cries of anguish from the Pedantic userbase (small as it may be) have not gone unheard. Even though Pedantic is a multi-command, command-line app similar to "git", I have decided that going forward, the "uci" command will be the default command so you don't have to specify it unless you also want to provide the uci-specific command-line options. As always, thank for your valuable feedback.

This new default behavior will be released with Pedantic 0.3. In all seriousness, I had already implemented this behavior given the problems people were having installing Pedantic in various chess GUIs.

Code: Select all

COMPLETE - 27) BUG: Default to UCI to make it easier to install Pedantic.

So, as we say in the business... sorry for your inconvenience.

[rdhoffmann]

Here's a mini-sample of Pedantic against my engine LCE (20 games)

1 LCE : 2435 20 (+ 9,= 6,- 5), 60.0 %
2 Pedantic : 2365 20 (+ 5,= 6,- 9), 40.0 %

Overall Pedantic plays very solid, it is better than my engine towards the endgame and in tactical situations. Positionally it is weaker and thus lost more games overall.

Looking forward to 0.3

[Dann Corbit]

The log of efforts and experiments by JoAnnP38 is fun and interesting. Thank you for letting us see through that special window.

[JoAnnP38]

The log of efforts and experiments by JoAnnP38 is fun and interesting. Thank you for letting us see through that special window.

Thanks for taking the time Dann!