Banksia GUI forums

Attempt 21: integrate Felicity EGTB with some chess GUIs

The work is outside this project. It tests the abilities of integrating and displaying. It is useful for checking EGTBs in visual ways.

Attempt 20: Xiangqi generator

The code for the Xiangqi generator has been added. It can generate endgames with a side with up to 2 attackers and one side with no attacker (armless). E.g., kraabkaabb, kcnaabbkaabb, kcpakaab. It could work with more attackers but I haven't checked them yet. Both ...

Attempt 19: more compact for chess index space

We reduced index space for chess. For 5 men chess EGTB, the index space sank about 13%. The size becomes 7.5 GB, a 15.5% reduction (compared with the previous size of 8.88 GB). However, the time to generate is about 29% longer (22 hours vs 17 hours ...

Attempt 18: create a test EPD file from all existent endgames

The test file will be used to verify the correctness of an EGTB later.

Attempt 17: Use table move generator

Use table move generator. It could speed up Perft to 10%. If using table move data for isInCheck function, the speed up is about 5% (slower).

The code is in the branch "tablemovegen".

Attempt 16: Store whole board data in Hist record

When making a move, whole board data is copied into Hist record, thus the takeback function could be simplified by copying back stored board.

- Chess perft 5 took 523 ms, 161% longer (slower) than Attempt 7

The code is in the branch ...

Attempt 15: calculate index spaces for more men for chess

From a question (@Dann Corbit) about the limit of the generator, we have checked and added all necessary code/modifications to make sure the generator can work with more men for chess endgames.

When indexing, the generator combines ...

Attempt 14: Improve the speed of generating all 5-men endgames for chess with the backward method

We made some improvements to speed up the generator with the backward method.

The generating time for 5-men chess is nearly 17 hours or 5 times as fast as the forwarding method.

Attempt 13: generate all 5-men endgames for chess using the backward method

We use a retro move generator to detect and work with only necessary positions, avoiding checking and updating all as the forwarding method. That caused a significant speed improvement.

The total generating time for 5 ...

Attempt 12: generate all 5-men endgames for chess

We generated all endgames 5-men (3 attackers + 2 Kings) for chess. The estimated size was about 10 GB, very small relatively compared with Xiangqi 2 attackers thus it is a much easier and quicker task. By doing that we could fix, and verify the ...

Attempt 11: calculate 5-men Index space for chess

Below is the table of all endgames of 5 men for chess. They are a total of 149 endgames and their index space is near 21 G. Suppose we store information of one index within 1 byte and we need to store information of both sides, total size = 21 G x ...

Attempt 10: index space for Xiangqi

If we ignore all two attackers with Rooks, then all attackers 2-vs-0 should be generating are: CC, CN, NN, CP, NP, PP. The below table shows all 729 endgames with those attackers + all configurations of defenders.

The largest index space is kcnaabbkaabb ...

Attempt 9:

Position indexes work for both Chess and Xiangqi/Jeiqi

Yes, I have been still working on BSG. I had been just slow down to do real-life duties.

You need to disable bubbles for opening books:

- Open panel Books/Egtbs (as first red arrow)
- Untick the box bubble. You may need to do the same for all opening books (select by the second red arrow)

Thanks for the report. Please ignore that error message. I have been testing to connect BSG with some electronic devices and forgot to remove the Bluetooth library when releasing.

Attempt 8:
We compare the access speeds of some arrays in memory:
- created some huge arrays in memory (about 7 GB) using 3 ways: malloc, std::vector and std::array
- create random values and set them to random locations in those arrays
- measure time
Conclusion: their speeds are quite similar. We ...

Attempt 6
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Just clean the code, rewrite some parts, and cut some redundant variants and functions.
- Chess perft 5 took 324 ms
- Xiangqi perft 5 took 5453 ms

The code looks better and becomes a bit faster

Attempt 7
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Our code for basic functions such as board ...

Attempt 5
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We tried to reduce the number of calling the function incheck for the Xiangqi board. Typically that function is called whenever making a move to check if that move is valid or invalid. The new code calls that function considering if it may affect the status of being incheck ...

Attempt 4

We run perft with Xiangqi (Chinese chess) board with the same techniques (mailbox representation + piece list). We used Pikafish (a Xiangqi chess engine developed from Stockfish) to compare. Pikafish was compiled for standard x86-64. All perft depths are 5 and for the start position ...

Perft speed
=====

The speed when generating EGTB depends much on the speed of some so basic functions:
- Move generator
- Check InCheck
- Make move, takeback

Perft is a perfect one to check the correctness and speed of those functions. In this task, we attempt to make those functions be fast ...

Felicity EGTB (Endgame database/tablebase) is an open source for generating and probing EGTB. All code is written in C++ (using the standard C++17 library). It supports some chess variants: chess, Xiangqi, and Jeiqi.

From testing, EGTB doesn't help chess engines much, in terms of strength/Elo ...

In Engine info panel, scores in red means they have been decreasing, blue - increasing.

For graphs, their colours are set in Settings. They could be colours of engines or customised.

There is a bug on setting Score for White side and it has been fixed for the next release. Thanks for the report!

Thanks for the report!

Could you please send me the engine log of those matches? Thanks again!

Thanks for the book!!!

I have done a quick glance, using Database Viewer of BSG to look inside your book. It looks fine. Just a few thoughts:
- The book is quite small since the size is under 1 MB, compared with typical books (over multi-MB or GB)
- The book is quite narrow (compared with typical ...

Thanks. All those bugs are fixed for the next release.

Version 0.58 (rc1 version) released

This version is RC1 to prepare for the first official version (1.0)!

Most of the efforts are to find and fix bugs and do some small changes such as colors, help, guides, and tooltips. However, there are some new things, including:

Limit tournament ...

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

I will focus on ECA after the first official release 1.0.

Thanks a lot for the report!

I have been struggling to reproduce the issue with BSG 0.57. I don't have Hiarcs 14 or Shredder 13. Thus I have tried Rodent IV on both macOS and Windows 10. On my tests, I have installed Rodent IV in two ways: 1) drag-drop the engine into BSG 2) use Settings->Engine ...

Thanks for the report. It is fixed for the next release!

Version 0.57 (New Year/rc0 version) released

This version is rc0 to prepare for the first official version (1.0)!

Besides some minor bug fixes, many small improvements and changes, there are some new things, including:
Edit variations (Fig. 1)
Display a text in the middle of the board (Fig. 1 ...

Do you mean the move from a2 to a1? (a1=Q)
I could do it on 0.56.

Below is your game after removing the result.

[Event "banksia game"]
[Site "*"]
[Date "2022.12.23"]
[Round "*"]
[White "Eubos 1.1.0"]
[Black "hm::Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition"]
[Result "*"]
[TimeControl "40/4800+0"]
[Time "18 ...

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I have been struggling to reproduce the issue. I have tried all Pawn moves of the Black side for the last position but all are fine. Which move did you do?

When trying, please remember to delete the result from the PGN file first. Otherwise, BSG will think the game ...

Thank you for the report!

According to your attached file, the game is terminated because of an illegal move. It means the black side (Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition) produced an illegal move and was ruled as a loser.

You may check its engine log to find the last move it produced.

BTW, I am not ...

When an engine is time out, BSG will wait for a period of that margin before ruling the game. If the engine could return a result within that period, the game could be continued, otherwise it will be terminated and that engine will be ruled as a loser (forfeited by timeout).

Margins can help to ...

Thanks for the report. I have been working on that issue!

Next two problems/bugs/feature requests:
1. The engines log file logengins.txt has logs of many different (replayed) tournaments, so "View engine-log of game x" doesn't load the correct log of game x of the last tournament but it opens the log of the first "game x" it finds in the file. An old one ...

Next bug: Opening a pgn containing chess960 games.
1. Download and expand FRC games of SF 15.1 played at CCRL: http://ccrl.chessdom.com/ccrl/404FRC/games-by-engine-commented/Stockfish_15_1.commented.[1000].pgn.7z
2a. Open the pgn in BanksiaGui 0.56 with option "standard chess": Database opens but ...

I have stored it in my to-do list as a bug since you saw it with the latest release. Thanks.

I am struggling to reproduce it even though I have tested with your engines for a while. Will come back to that issue later.

But... the problem with the wrong stats of my old engines is still there even with 0.56D.

The file you sent me has the wrong numbers already, thus we can't do anything with it. I guess those wrong numbers were caused by parsing engine info when the code has bugs in the previous version. Just ...

Could you help me to do a quick test:
- open the configuration folder of BSG (you may go to Settings—>Log & Configuration and click the button to open it)
- close BSG, to make sure it won’t save anything more to that folder
- rename or move that folder to somewhere just temporarily, to make sure ...

Thank you a lot, Matthies.

I have fixed some bugs based on your information, and data. The new version (today's sub-version D) has run hundreds of games with all your provided engines without any problem with BSG.

Okay, after some time not using Banksia I have downloaded 0.56 for Windows and run ...

I have just uploaded a new sub-version (D), mainly for fixing some known bugs. Please re-download it and help us to test it.

There are some improvements and new features, including editing sentences for speeching. Basically, that could support multi-languages:

https://i.imgur.com/rP221Ve.png ...

The problem with remembering motors has been solved, but there is a second problem:

When I set everything as I want and start the GUI from the beginning, the factory settings appear and so on.

So finally I'm back to version 0.55. Because either there is something wrong with this version or with ...

2. Some strange numbers in the Tech table. See screenshot (I hope it will be visible in the post... I will post a link as a fallback). Seems that for some of my older versions the moves/game and time/game is obviously wrong.
https://imgur.com/a/v8cBBEa
https://imgur.com/a/v8cBBEa

Could you ...

Thank you for the suggestions/bug report.

I am going to fix bugs and implement some of them for the next release.

Improvements in Database were really great. But searching in Databases maybe simpler and may be more user friendly.

Could you suggest more?

Kindly provide auto-purging control ...

I have Windows 10

I installed the motors in two ways

Yes, I saw the settings window.

Earlier, when I set the coordinates on the chessboard, Banksia also turned off and did not want to turn on.

I copied the settings from version 0.55 and it's ok, but the problem was with remembering the engines ...

Okay, after some time not using Banksia I have downloaded 0.56 for Windows and run some tournament.
In this tournament all my versions of RubiChess starting from 0.1 up to current 20221120 were included.
Find below some things that I noticed.

1. Version 0.1 of my engine seems to crash Banksia GUI ...

Thank you for the report!

I have been struggling to reproduce the issue. Can you tell me more info:
- What your OS
- How did you install the engine? By dragging-dropping it into BSG or via the Settings dialog box?
- Right after installing the engine, did you see it in the Settings dialog box?

Thanks

No at the moment. BSG uses a complicated code/data for clocks since it supports multi-timers, not easy to change.

You may:
- edit manually the JSON file (banksiaplaying.json). All information of the current tournament including timers stored on this file
- edit the tournament: a) remove non-played ...

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