Banksia GUI released

[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

[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.

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

Thank you too for the idea & suggestion

[phhnguyen]

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

Yes, but IMO, the tbhits does not change much by plies, thus, BSG prints it in the line above the table of engine info, not within that table. Mostly for saving space and look simpler

[phhnguyen]

Latest BanksiaGUI misbehaves under iOS 14.5 on an iPhoneSE:


-it does not rotate, so certain things are not readible
-is there an option to specify which information (depth, nodes, time) get's printed/inserted in the pgn and in what form (ms vs seconds, nodes vs knodes..?




-Options and Level menus are borked, in the sense that they slide to the red line and automatically back (within a second or so). If one is comically fast enough, one can change the Level (playing against comp/etc).

Wishlist: please print/insert in pgn also the thinking time for the human side whilst playing against the comp (in min:ss format preferably).


Thanks+Greetings

Thanks for the bug report and suggestions. I will come to work with BSG for iOS soon. If you could, please create issues for them in my GitHub at https://github.com/nguyenpham/banksiagui-ios. Since it is an open-source, someone or me may work with them.

[NoChessNoLife]

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

Yes, but IMO, the tbhits does not change much by plies, thus, BSG prints it in the line above the table of engine info, not within that table. Mostly for saving space and look simpler

The problem is that Banksia GUI fails to display the tbhits above the line for some engines. Like Komodo 7, Wasp 4.5.
This bug was introduced since version 39. Older versions before version 39 displays the above line tbhits.
Would not worry too much about saving space. It is a important feature to see the "tbhits" because how else can one debug the engine to see if the tablebases are being used at all.

[phhnguyen]

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

Yes, but IMO, the tbhits does not change much by plies, thus, BSG prints it in the line above the table of engine info, not within that table. Mostly for saving space and look simpler

The problem is that Banksia GUI fails to display the tbhits above the line for some engines. Like Komodo 7, Wasp 4.5.
This bug was introduced since version 39. Older versions before version 39 displays the above line tbhits.
Would not worry too much about saving space. It is a important feature to see the "tbhits" because how else can one debug the engine to see if the tablebases are being used at all.

Oh, I see. Thanks for the report. It is fixed for the next release.

[phhnguyen]

Version 0.42 beta released

Fixed bugs:

• Elo offset for databases: cannot anchor to a player

• Cannot directly edit names, paths... of engines by double click in Settings

• Crash when clear board on editing

Some small improvements/adjustments such as upgraded metallic theme

New features:

• Right-click to highlight squares, right-click and drag to draw arrows. Press Shift, Ctrl, Alt buttons to change colors. Do the same squares to remove an individual highlight, arrow. Any left-click on the board will erase all those highlights and arrows. Colors can be modified via Settings (Fig. 1)

• Show threatened pieces - the pieces are attacked without any protection or are attacked by smaller value pieces (say, a Queen is being attacked by a Bishop regardless it’s protected or not). This function may be very useful for beginners to reduce nonsense losing pieces (Fig. 2)

• Edit tournament: users can easily and quickly change players, remove, reset games, merge two tournaments... without working directly with JSON files. It’s useful if you want to change/upgrade engines (Fig. 3)

Fig. 1 New feature: right-click with drag-drop and Ctrl, Alt, Shift buttons to draw highlights and arrows

]
Fig. 2 New feature: show threatened pieces when being attacked by smaller value pieces or having not any legal protection


Fig. 3 New feature: edit the tournament

[JohnS]

Version 0.42 beta released

Great work, in figure 3 do you mean source player.