Banksia GUI released

[AdminX]

Feature request:

This GUI already provides alot, so I don't know if it is possible to ask for more. How difficult would it be to implement a personal "Engine Cloud" type of feature whereby one could use their more powerful system running Banksia and have it communicate with Banksia running on a weaker machine from a remote location? Chessbase does this as a service via the "Cloud", however I doubt that the cloud may even be needed for this to work.

[hgm]

Do you know the percentage (roughly) of CECP engines supported (correctly) that standard of mate scores? If they are the major, all are almost done. I prefer the easy way. Otherwise, we still need to apply some clever methods (such as one proposed by Ras) to detect mate score ranges for individual engines.

I really have no idea. These days I hardly bother with Chess engines at all, I am doing almost exclusively variants.

My policy is "never try to correct engine defects in the GUI". In the long run this will just be detrimental for everyone. It perpetuates faults, erodes standards. If one GUI accepts crap from the engine, engine authors will think they have the right to make a mess of it, and will start to complain against developers of other GUIs that their crap doesn't work there too. Before you kno it there will be an avelanche of crap. I consider it immoral to encourage that.

If engines do not print the standard mate score, just show what they print, and let the user do the calculation. If it annoys the user, let him complain to the engine developer.

[Ras]

If engines do not print the standard mate score, just show what they print, and let the user do the calculation. If it annoys the user, let him complain to the engine developer.

That's not how a good UI works. The only effect would be that users avoid CECP engines. Also, your idea doesn't work, or else the problem would have been long gone.

[hgm]

The only effect would be that users avoid CECP engines.

And so they should, if these are crappy. They might as well complain that some engines play poor moves, and require GUIs to run Stockfish in the background to correct engine blunders, to make poor engines look better.

[Ras]

And so they should, if these are crappy.

Uhm yeah. Maybe they also ditch crappy GUIs whose authors follow such a philosophy - and use Banksia instead of Winboard.

[hgm]

Indeed, it is a sad fact that immoral GUI developers could try to score points by implementing features that are damaging the interests of the computer-chess community as a whole. All we can do is appeal to them to not put their own interests above the common good, and do the right thing.

I, for one, would never betray the community just for the purpose of promoting WinBoard. If people don't want to use it because of that, tough luck. Life is like that. But if criminals prosper by preying on the innocent, it still would be no reason for me to join the criminals, and rather go down with the innocents.

[Ras]

and do the right thing.

If "the computer chess community" had had any trouble with such workarounds, they would have done the right thing and defined that right in the protocol from the beginning. But nobody cared when it would have mattered, and now it's just one more point of hassle when using CECP engines. Let's be real, they won't be updated, not least because a lot of them are legacy software anyway.

[hgm]

Well, if people were happy to see 327.60 or 79.98 scores then, why should it suddenly be so important to show them something different now?

It is my task as a GUI developer to provide the opportunity for what the engine might want to do. That opprtunity now exists: they can either present the user with a mate score like #7, or with some weird number. So they even have a choice.

Who cares about legacy engines anyway?

[Ras]

Well, if people were happy to see 327.60 or 79.98 scores then, why should it suddenly be so important to show them something different now?

Because GUIs in 2020 are expected to be better than something from the early 90s. This is called "progress", and Banksia is aiming for becoming something better.

Also, people were never "happy" to see that, it was just that GUI devs didn't bother (just like with all the CLI and .rc/ini file nonsense - for a GUI!). Hardly astonishing, given that Unix/Linux where Xboard came from aren't exactly known for devs with UI design knowledge, even less so in the 90s.

[hgm]

Well, if people are not happy to see it, why do engines print it? The GUI or its author is not to blame for that! Long before I was involved with WinBoard my engine Joker already printed mate-in-N as 10000+N, so that I could easily see the DTM without having to do a calculation. Worked in every GUI. (I had tried M6 for mate-in-6 first, but that turned out to make the GUI completely ignore the thinking output... The PV is free format in CECP, but not the scores.)

Progress comes from discarding crappy old engines that print crappy mate scores. Not by making GUIs jump through hoops in order to prolong the misery of having them around.

As for the ini files... It is not how I would design things, but there are people around that seem, to like them. I don't know if you have seen the discussion about the SCID engine configuration dialog, but when the developer proposes a GUI, along comes a user with as a first complaint that it doesn't offer an option for editing the engine ini file...