Banksia GUI released

[phhnguyen]

Hello,

Today I experienced a weird bug when using "Local Network". I was trying to setup a game between Allie+Stein v0.7 vs Eman 5.70. For some reason every time I tried to start the game from my laptop, the Allie engine would not start on my desktop. I was able to start the game from my desktop and all worked as it should on my laptop, just not the other way around. This may be a engine related problem, but I wanted to inform you anyway.

Thanks a lot for the report. I have found a bug preventing a game of two remote engines playing (but for the pair of one local, one remote is still OK). Fixed for the next release.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.32 beta released

Version 0.32 beta released

* Fixed bugs: some small bugs
* Some small improvements/adjustments
* New features: 
- Armageddon timer: set two different timers for two sides, draw counted as a win for Black
- Create opening books based on engine searching



Armageddon timer

[phhnguyen]

Create opening books by engines

I have known that we can use engines to calculate to create opening books. I have also known about some major disadvantages in this way. Recently I was inspired by some discussions on how good (and bad) some engines when playing openings. I decided to create this tool as a new feature of BanksiaGUI thus we all can try.

At the moment this feature is limited to build opening books for chess variant and Polyglot format only. It will use an engine to evaluate nodes of the opening tree to rank, expand, or trim off them.

There are two methods to build tree and expand branches:

1. Evaluate nodes from the root, wide first, keep and expand only nodes if their scores are from the threshold. If we set the threshold high enought to trim harder, the tree could be deeper

2. Create a full tree to the given depth (it is actually a Perft tree), evaluate all leaves nodes then calculate all internal nodes (via min-max algorithm) and trim off all nodes under the threshold score. Look like this method give better quality (than the first one) for the same depth. However, because of trimming after calculating, it has to calculate too many when the number of nodes grows exponentially by the depth, thus it is suitable only for creating small/shallow trees as well as small books,

This feature is the first implemented and there is still huge room for improvement. Please try and give me your feedback.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.33 beta released

* Fixed serious bug: did not send options to engines
* Some improvements/adjustments

• Open PGN via URL: faster, can open multi-URLs, show more info and can control more

• Lichess bot: improve challenge dialog

• Tab names in different colors based on their tasks

* New features:

• Customizable Armageddon result type (none, white-must-win, black-must-win)

Select Armageddon result type

[AdminX]

Suggestion:

Is it poosible to have the remote engine send back engine data to the host system? Such as Move Time and Eval, so that they can be displayed in the host GUI. Currently I have been using Chessbase to merge the PGN's from the remote and host systems, however if this is possible I would no longer need to do that. Plus it would be nice to see the eval graph for the other side all in the same Gui.

Click Image for larger view:

[phhnguyen]

Suggestion:

Is it poosible to have the remote engine send back engine data to the host system? Such as Move Time and Eval, so that they can be displayed in the host GUI. Currently I have been using Chessbase to merge the PGN's from the remote and host systems, however if this is possible I would no longer need to do that. Plus it would be nice to see the eval graph for the other side all in the same Gui.

Click Image for larger view:

Thanks a lot for the suggestion. It is implemented for the next release.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.34 beta released

* Fixed a serious bug: did not add new engines
* Some small improvements/adjustments:
- Engines playing in the local network send computing information

[AdminX]

Version 0.34 beta released

* Fixed a serious bug: did not add new engines
* Some small improvements/adjustments:
- Engines playing in the local network send computing information

I will have to start calling you Ricochet Rabbit! Damn your fast!

[AdminX]

I have two systems, both with two video cards (Intel and Nvidia). One is a Desktop and the other a laptop. On the laptop "Opacity" appears to control opactiy for both the App and Panel BK. On the desktop for some reason it only controls the App BK. Any ideas on why this is? I think that in a earlier version you could set opacity for each individually.

[perejaslav]

Version 0.34 beta released

GUI crashes for me during test tournaments. 3 times in a row, so I switched to LittleBlitzer