Banksia GUI released

[AlexChess]

Thank you for confirming that.
I prefer Arena Chess crosstable 1, 0, = in each cell but It has other bugs... and isn't available for Mac natovely.

2th question: Can I add / remove engines without losing all previous results in tournament? (On Arena Is very easy and fast)

Now I try also cutechess

Regards, AlexChess

[primer_-]

I'd like to play solitaire chess in Banksia by bringing in a pgn file, then navigating move by move and entering my response to each position that comes up. After going through the whole game like this, I'd go back and analyze my moves against the moves actually played by the game.

However, after I open a pgn file, it is "read only", i.e., I can navigate the moves but not enter my own as variations.

Is there a way to do what I want?

[TimoK]

First of all I want to say a BIG THANK YOU to Nguyen Hong Pham for developing this really great chess GUI!

At the moment I'm only missing one feature - maybe it is already implemented and I don't know how to use it:
Is it possible to play the same engine tournament on more than just one computer? I think that requires the GUI to have a tournament file that can be accessed by all computers via network. This tournament file must contain all the necessary information about the tournament (pairings etc) and it should handle the distribution of the games. There must also be some way of treating access conflicts if more than one computer tries to write down changes to the file.

With ShredderGUI it is possible to play a tournament distributed over network with many computers, but unfortunately it lacks of many other features that are already implemented in BanksiaGUI. So I'd prefer to play my tournaments with BanksiaGUI, but it would be only easy to manage if a network distributed play with more than one computer would be possible.

[phhnguyen]

I am using Banksia GUI lately and it is very good for doing tournaments with different time control for each player.

The concurrency is another excellent feature of Banksia if you want to play several games simultaneously using a few cores per engine.

The problem of the concurrency is that you can't use it with a GPU engine. In order to do it possible I propose to implement a feature in Banksia
defining in each engine a variable that indicates whether the engine is GPU type or it is CPU type.
In the Overall options the "Cores" option must be splitted in "Cores per CPU engine" and "Cores per GPU engine" (typically equal to 2).
The games of the tournament must be organized in a way that only one GPU engine must use the GPU and when the game is finished, the GPU can be used by another GPU engine. So the concurrency of the GPU engines is 1 while the user can set the concurrency of the CPU engines greater than one.

One way to organize a tournament is to play the GPU engine games first, using the remaining cores with the concurrency set for the CPU engines. At the end of the GPU games the computer can use all the CPU engines cores plus the cores reserved for the GPU engines previously to finish the games with CPU engines.

I know that if we want to play a tournament with many GPU engines, the concurrency would lose efficiency because the GPU would always be busy while the CPU would have unused cores.

With this new feature interesting experiments can be done!

I want to thank Nguyen Hong Pham for creating Banksia GUI and wish him the best for him and his family.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion!

Could you or anyone post the option list of Komodo MCTS? (Just run it in command line, enter command “uci”, copy and post here). I am trying to auto-detect GPU engines from their option list instead of having another human-fill field. Thanks

[phhnguyen]

The Banksia GUI website just forwards you to malware sites currently. Why?

The Banksia GUI website just forwards you to malware sites currently. Why?

This happens to me all the time when I click on the first google hit (whose link is written correctly as banksiagui.com). Today I noticed that google added "This site may be hacked".

Thank all for the report. The website has attacked by an URL injection spam. Look like all download/data files are not affected and the website is not in Google blacklist. The issue is almost fixed and I have been working to find the way they hacked (perhaps being hacked via some weak points of WordPress plugins) and make sure they can’t repeat easily.

[Modern Times]

I've just tried this for the first time. I tried to add Stockfish 13, and it refused to do it, saying that an NNUE engine has to have a separate NNUE file, and of course with Stockfish and others it is integrated into the exe. I assume it is interpreting the "Use NNUE" UCI parameter. As it happens you can download the SF NNUE file as a separate file, but that won't be the case with all engines that have NNUE within the exe. Am I doing something wrong ?

[phhnguyen]

I've just tried this for the first time. I tried to add Stockfish 13, and it refused to do it, saying that an NNUE engine has to have a separate NNUE file, and of course with Stockfish and others it is integrated into the exe. I assume it is interpreting the "Use NNUE" UCI parameter. As it happens you can download the SF NNUE file as a separate file, but that won't be the case with all engines that have NNUE within the exe. Am I doing something wrong ?

Just ignore (close the warning dialogue box). SF can run fine. That feature (warning and help to download NNUE files) was designed when NNUE files were not integrated with SF. It will be removed from the next release.

[KLc]

Thank all for the report. The website has attacked by an URL injection spam. Look like all download/data files are not affected and the website is not in Google blacklist. The issue is almost fixed and I have been working to find the way they hacked (perhaps being hacked via some weak points of WordPress plugins) and make sure they can’t repeat easily.

Yes, that’s what I thought. Great you could fix it. If the site uses WordPress, I would update WP and all plugins to the latest versions. Maybe als use two factor authentication.

[phhnguyen]

Happy Christmas

Do Banksia GUI take castling rights into consideration in case of threefold repetition ?

Karpov versus Miles, 1986

[d]r3kb1r/5ppp/4p3/1N6/4P3/8/Pn1BK1PP/R6R b kq - 1 22

Karpov claims draw with his third move Nb5. But the draw by repetion rule also considers the castling availability. At the first Karpov's Nb5, Anthony Miles still had queen side castling movement. With the second Karpov's Nb5, Anthony Miles had no more the castling available. So, the first position is different of the second by this reason. By a mistake, Karpov claims the draw after his thirt Nb5 move, but the position was repeated only twice.

It need to be repeated four times.

Interesting issue!

Yes, BSG counts castling rights, thus it won't consider as a repetition if the castling rights changed. In fact, BSG produces directly hash keys as Polyglot does so it could use directly Polyglot opening books (https://github.com/nguyenpham/Banksia/b ... .cpp#L1593). So far look like nobody found any mistake of those keys

[phhnguyen]

I tried using the network connect freature of 0.38 ?? does it really work?

The differnet banskia guis find each other and chat messages can be sent, engines work locally.. both computer joined and engines show up in selection to set up game and tournament.. But any effort to play tournament or human against a xxx:engine remotely is simply futile.. the remote computer never ever makes a move/calculates and always loses on time withou even starting the engine when games starts... Is there some "trick" to get this to work os it it just buggy/non-working in win-version?? I would assume its not a networking issue as the Chat function and discovery function works ok, indicating that the two guis indeed talk to each other..

Cheers,
Twobeer

Thanks a lot for the report. There’s a bug and it’s fixed for the next release.