Banksia GUI released

[AdminX]

One more suggestion! When using Lichess Bots, can we have and option to display the local Bot on the bottom. This way we can view the game from our engines point of view and not have to rotate the board.

Thanks

[cpeters]

Problem 1
Problem 2

https://www.bilder-upload.eu/upload/2a4 ... 599252.jpg


https://www.bilder-upload.eu/upload/750 ... 599420.jpg

[herO]

Hello,

Thanks for version 41. Another idea, Anyway I just was wondering if there is some way to make possible the use of Hiarcs Opening Books inside of the Banksia GUI as a optional opening book choice.

Thanks in advance.

It would be an interesting feature! Only Hiarcs engine is able to use HCS book inside Banksia GUI (Hiarcs engine uses it internally via UCI commands). It would be nice if Banksia will be able to use those books, but it will only work as a GUI book, so those moves have to be played by GUI, not by engines, because other engines does not support HCS books. Many of them support only bin books. The same feature could be done with CTG books. It would be better to use Hiarcs CTG then Hiarcs HCS, because HCS only contains moves without statistics, but CTG version contains also statistics.

[herO]

There is a serious bug in Lichess bot feature. Whenever my bot start with a black pieces, my engine does not make any moves. Then game is aborted after 60 seconds. Engine only plays moves when engine starts with white pieces.

[AdminX]

There is a serious bug in Lichess bot feature. Whenever my bot start with a black pieces, my engine does not make any moves. Then game is aborted after 60 seconds. Engine only plays moves when engine starts with white pieces.

May I ask what engine you are using or it does not matter? I have only used LC0 (GPU) and it seems to work okay under Windows 10 Pro.

[herO]

There is a serious bug in Lichess bot feature. Whenever my bot start with a black pieces, my engine does not make any moves. Then game is aborted after 60 seconds. Engine only plays moves when engine starts with white pieces.

May I ask what engine you are using or it does not matter? I have only used LC0 (GPU) and it seems to work okay under Windows 10 Pro.

It happens for Deep Hiarcs 14 WCS, Shredder 13, Rodent IV and Komodo Dragon. When I use Banksia v29, it works fine.

[NoChessNoLife]

Is it possible to add another field called "tbhits" in the column?
Thanks.

[herO]

I have to report that Lichess bot feature still does not work properly. A lot of times games end as "Timed out". When it happens, Banksia does not kill any process and engine still calculates next move. Even when click on "Go offline" and then "Go online" button to refresh actual state of the game, even then Banksia does not kill engine process. When I woke up in the morning I always see 5 - 15 engines process within Banksia GUI. Bullet games are unpllayable with Banksia gui, because a tons of games end as engine lost on time. I tried a lot of TC by myself and I found out that almost 70% of all bullet games end like this. Is it a way how to improve it? I remember that this happen because of Lichess has tons of lags even my internet connection is fast and stable.

[phhnguyen]

I have to report that Lichess bot feature still does not work properly. A lot of times games end as "Timed out". When it happens, Banksia does not kill any process and engine still calculates next move. Even when click on "Go offline" and then "Go online" button to refresh actual state of the game, even then Banksia does not kill engine process. When I woke up in the morning I always see 5 - 15 engines process within Banksia GUI. Bullet games are unpllayable with Banksia gui, because a tons of games end as engine lost on time. I tried a lot of TC by myself and I found out that almost 70% of all bullet games end like this. Is it a way how to improve it? I remember that this happen because of Lichess has tons of lags even my internet connection is fast and stable.

Hi Martin,

Thanks a lot for the bug report.

I have been struggling to reproduce the error. Can you help as follows:

1) Turn on engine log from Settings dialog as the bottom line of the below image, tick, and setup the log path


2) Try to run with Lichess bots. Whenever the game is finished, please check the log if BanksiaGUI has sent the command "quit" to the engine to terminate it.

You may send the log file to me so we can check together.

If BanksiaGUI doesn't send "quit", clearly there is a bug somewhere. Otherwise, there may be bugs in engines or GUI + engines.

Basically, an engine should be quitted if it receives the command "quit". Some may refuse, thus Banksia GUI will try a few more times before using some harder methods to terminate the engine. If after all the engine is still survival, BSG will leave it alone since the resource can't recover anyways (until resetting BSG). If you see that case, you may change to a "good"/popular engine such as Stockfish to try and compare. Thanks

[Javier Ros]

Many thanks for implement this new feature of concurrency for GPU and CPU in Banksia GUI.
It is a very useful feature for testing GPU vs CPU.

Best regards

• New special functions for GPU engines, a user: 1) can mark engines as GPUs 2) can set up serially CPU cores for GPU engines which may be different from ones for none-GPU ones 3) get clever tournament concurrency: it auto arranges to make sure no more than one GPU game can be played at a moment but still maximize concurrency (Fig. 2)

That is an amazing feature ! No other GUI has this to my knowledge. Presumably the tournament would get to a point where it is only the queued GPU matches that remain, so all the games from that point would be concurrency 1 ? At that point the rest of the machine is freed up for other things if you have spare CPU cores.

Yes, you’re right. We can get some benefit of concurrency only when there are both GPU and non-GPU games, but not only GPU ones.

I think Winboard and Banksia GUIs are the only ones now that are in active development.

I think the situation is much more optimistic than that. I have seen already some chess GUIs have been updated recently, for example: Eschecs, Cutechess, PyChess, Nibbler… They are even more active than WinBoard (the latest official version 4.9.1 of WinBoard is actually 4 years ago).

For Banksia GUI, I proud it is likely the one has received the biggest number of ideas, suggestions, bug-reports and encourages from users (thanks all again) . It also has the highest frequency of releasing since the time between two versions was averagely 12 days and all releases so far have contained new features