Banksia GUI released

[CMCanavessi]

I have also been working with "bestmove 0000" which Minic prints out when being stopped because of wrong ponder move. Theory, BSG should work well with that move (accepts and then tells Minic to start computing as usual). Just being struggling to reproduce.

I'll just quote this part, because the Minic invalid O-O-O string has already been fixed by the author. Banksia works ok with engines that return "bestmove 0000", I've seen it. I think it's the info strings between the stop command banksia says and the bestmove the engine returns that are the problem. Vajolet2 2.8.0 and Minic 3.10 both have this problem. You can quickly test it by doing a tournament between the 2 engines with ponder on. Vajolet loses on time 7 out of 10 games.

[phhnguyen]

I am in the process of upgrading my Raspberry Pi 4 8GB model with a SSD and a new case. I just installed Ubuntu Mate on it. Then the thought hit me, how difficult would it be to port Banksia over so that it could run on a Arm processor? I am also in the process of installing Picochess on it, so in theory I should be able use all engines created to run on Arm processors in Banksia also if it were ported to Arm. Keep hope alive! This is just a thought, not a request yet ...

That’s doable. Even I was almost going to buy a Raspberry Pi just for testing. However, I postponed that plan later since needed to focus some other tasks, including real life ones. Sure sooner or later I will support directly some ARM hardware (Ras, M1)

Hey buddy, I hope your wife is doing well and feeling better...

Thank you!

I have a bug report:

I have noticed that there is a bug when 1. engines are asked to use a "seconds per move", especially in situations where 2. I am using the multi-time control and giving the human side unlimited time.

I think this bug is more related to the multi-time control feature.

Can you tell me more about that bug? What happen/should we expect?

I have checked but not clear. If that is the timeout of the engine, set the margin to a higher value.

Another feature that would be nice, but also easy to implement, is for the engine's rating to also show up in the exported pgn file. As of now it does not.

Thanks buddy, you're doing excellent work.

Thanks for the idea. It is taken.

[abgursu]

Hi,
I have a bug too and I'm not sure what is causing that. Sometimes when my bot is playing and challenge is on at the same time,(and concurrency is set to 1), GUI actually send the challenge to another bot and if accepted, Banksia GUI crushes till I manually cancel the second game or Lichess automatically cancels the second game. I really checked everything and am sure the bug is Banksia's. I unchecked everything in the accept menu, I manually set "Can other players challenge you?" to never in lichess. Seriously, I have 5 loss and 4 of them is because of time forfeit caused by not-responding Banksia.
I'd be really glad if you can fix this.
Best Regards...

[Eduard]

A lot has gotten much better. We must have patience. For me, the GUI keeps crashing inexplicably during the game or goes offline. However, the game continues on lichess. So that the GUI can go online again, I have to close the browser and then restart the GUI. And then click Go online. If I click on Go online then the GUI crashes again. On average, I have to repeat these steps 5 to 6 times. That sometimes costs bid to 60s time. That's why I play with a high move overhead in order to have a minute more in an emergency.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.48 beta released

Fixed bugs:
* A crash when turning on/off graphs a few times
* Games of chess 960 tournaments may be truncated when re-loading from files
* Lichess bots can’t remember none-auto timers; they may not obey concurrency number
* Ponder: may not send command “go” to engines after receiving null moves (0000)

Some small improvements/adjustments

New features:
* Lichess bots: auto chat (Fig. 1)
* Graph: a new type line (differ from the previous line-dot); can show all graphs in one panel and all graphs in one space (Fig. 2 & 3)
* Use mouse wheel to scroll moves
* Move list: customizable colours, use figures for pieces (Fig. 4)
* New themes: Dark (Fig. 4), Old paper (Fig. 5), and old magazines
* New safer way to write to JSON files: write to temporary files (.json.tmp) first then rename to main files (.json) when old file renamed to backup ones (.json.bk). That can reduce the risk of being corrupted data because of interruptions when writing
* ECA, tournaments: have multi backups and daily-backup which are fully auto managed/deleted
* Can set two different folders for Syzygy: one for engines, one for GUI’s adjudication
* Some small improvements for ECA: can evaluate internodes (instead of leaf nodes only - the purpose is to create a kind of computing data banks, used for multi-purpose later)


Fig. 1 Libot chat setup. Each message is selected randomly from a list box. That can avoid messages being the same and boring every time, make the chat more natural/humanity


Fig. 2 All graphs are in one panel. That’s not flexible as when they are in separated panels but it is more efficient on space and more tidy


Fig. 3 All graphs share a space. That’s the most compact, save the most space. However, it may look unclear and so complicated. Thus it is suitable only for very small numbers of graphs (e.g., 2). Users may need to try-error to find the best configuration such as the number of graphs, their types, colors, transparency…
Any idea to improve?



Fig. 4 Dark theme


Fig. 5 Old paper theme (designed by Ted Summers)

[AlexChess]

Hi phhnguyen!

Reading the release notes I think that 0.48 still doesn't fix "add new engine"? (Tried with Mac but it says 2000 games added )

No problem, I still have to wait for some new native engines

Thank you,
Statistics are very nice (I will use bars)

Best regards, Alex

[phhnguyen]

Hi phhnguyen!

Reading the release notes I think that 0.48 still doesn't fix "add new engine"? (Tried with Mac but it says 2000 games added )

No problem, I still have to wait for some new native engines

Thank you,
Statistics are very nice (I will use bars)

Best regards, Alex

It’s fixed. However, if you use an old tournament which has been added games and/or removed games/engines before, the engines in the internal list may be not consistent, affect the new number.

You may try with a new tournament to see the difference

[Eduard]

Thank you Pham for the new version 0.48!

You are doing a lot of work.

I now have Banksia installed on my old laptop too. At first I had a problem because my Windows 10 Home could not find a DLL when starting Banksia > "msvcp140_1.dll". I downloaded one from the Internet and copied it into the Banksia directory (Banksia is not on partition C for me). Then I was able to start Banksia. Maybe you can include this DLL in future versions so that there are no problems.

I am not sure whether I have installed the correct DLL (the download said 64 bit for Windows Vista). My CPU is an "i3 M 370 Core Duo 2.4 GHz" with Windows 10 Home 64 Bit.

Unfortunately I have a problem with the notation window. If I have loaded an analysis engine and then want to play moves forwards or backwards in the notation, the GUI immediately crashes completely. If the engine is not loaded, however, you can move forward or backward in the notation.

[AlexChess]

Hi phhnguyen!

Reading the release notes I think that 0.48 still doesn't fix "add new engine"? (Tried with Mac but it says 2000 games added )

No problem, I still have to wait for some new native engines

Thank you,
Statistics are very nice (I will use bars)

Best regards, Alex

It’s fixed. However, if you use an old tournament which has been added games and/or removed games/engines before, the engines in the internal list may be not consistent, affect the new number.

You may try with a new tournament to see the difference

Thank you, my dear chess friend! I try NOW!

[CMCanavessi]

Awesome release !!!