WinBoard/XBoard 4.8.0 released

[Ferdy]

Hmm, nasty. WB protocol does specify that error messages like "not found" given at the start of the engine would make the GUI assume the engine refused to start, But of course UCI engines are not bound by this, and Polyglot seems to pass on the message to XBoard.

Now I thought that UCI engines were not supposed to volunteer any error messages, so that makes Spark non-compliant. But Polyglot should really filter this out. It seems to pass it on to the GUI as a comment (prefixed with #), but apparently it is even considered a fatal error message by XBoard in this form. It is a bit late now, but tomorrow I will have a look at this.

This is too one of the reasons why ordinary user prefer other gui to run engines and most of these engines print these winboard-dangerous messages even before receiving xboard or uci commands.

[Carlos777]

Thanks for your help HGM and Ferdinand. I will try your suggestions.

It's odd because this does not occur with Winboard 4.6.2

I like WB because I can play many instances of it at the same time for the same tournament getting advantage of the multiple cores. Is there any other GUI that can make the same thing?

[Ferdy]

Thanks for your help HGM and Ferdinand. I will try your suggestions.

It's odd because this does not occur with Winboard 4.6.2

I like WB because I can play many instances of it at the same time for the same tournament getting advantage of the multiple cores. Is there any other GUI that can make the same thing?

That 4.6.2 is also stable on my system, newer versions I got winboard exited unexpectedly from time to time when running tournaments.
You can run one or more instances of arena and fritz, just be careful with the file naming of games. Or better install arena in different directories. Just combine the pgn later.

[Carlos777]

If I want to run a double RR tourney, it would be difficult to set the games in 2 instances of Arena or Fritz, WB works just fine in this case and also for swiss tourneys.

Now if I want to run a 4xRR it would be possible to run 2 double RR tournaments with 2 instances of Arena.

But what if I have an 8 core PC?, I could run 7 instances of WB for the same tournament, something that I could not do it in Arena or Fritz.

[Adam Hair]

It is possible to run a tournament using 7 out of 8 cores with Arena in the manner Ferdinand mentioned, but it is more cumbersome than using Winboard. If the cutechess GUI was complete, it would be a viable contender to Winboard for running an engine tournament on multiple cores. I do use cutechess' command line interface for tournaments/testing, but then the games are not viewable in real time.

[hgm]

I installed WB 4.8.0b and added Spark 1.0 with the following settings:

"Spark 1.0" -fcp "spark-1.0-win64-mp-corei.exe" -fd "C:\wb48\Engines\spark" -fn "Spark 1.0" -fNoOwnBookUCI -fUCI

Anyway, when I try to run it, I got this message:

Failed to start first chess program polyglot -noini -ec "spark-1.0-win64-mp-corei.exe" -fd "C:\wb48\Engines\spark" -uci NalimovCache=4 on localhost: # Warning: book not found: spark.bbk

The thing is that I cannot start the engine in order to set it in Engine #1 Settings.

Something similar happens when I install SmarThink 1.7.0, this time because of # EGBT files not found

I have installed like 8 other engines without problems.

How could I fix this?

Regards,

Carlos

OK, I figured out the problem. Seems I had broken Polyglot, by leaving in a print statement that I had put there for debugging purposes...

This print statement would relay anything the engine would say to the GUI, after prefixing it with '#' (so that it would appear in the winboard.debug file). I had not realized that XBoard would consider messages containing phrases like "not found" or "permission denied" as fatal even when they are 'commented out' by a leading '#', because it scans for those even before starting to parse WB protocol. And neither had I realized that UCI engines could sent such messages. Anyway, the print statement should have been removed after I was done debugging, or at least should have been made subject to some debug or log option being switched on. (This explains why WinBoard 4.6.2 did not seem to have it: it used an older Polyglot.)

I posted a Polyglot that fixes this (v2.0.3) at

http://hgm.nubati.net/polyglot.exe

I will use this to replace the Polyglot 2.0.2 in the WinBoard 4.8.0 installer, to stop spreading the defective 2.0.2.

[Carlos777]

It is possible to run a tournament using 7 out of 8 cores with Arena in the manner Ferdinand mentioned, but it is more cumbersome than using Winboard. If the cutechess GUI was complete, it would be a viable contender to Winboard for running an engine tournament on multiple cores. I do use cutechess' command line interface for tournaments/testing, but then the games are not viewable in real time.

Hi Adam,

That is the problem with cutechess, you can't watch the games in real time. I guess I will keep using WB for this kind of tournaments.

[Carlos777]

OK, I figured out the problem. Seems I had broken Polyglot, by leaving in a print statement that I had put there for debugging purposes...

This print statement would relay anything the engine would say to the GUI, after prefixing it with '#' (so that it would appear in the winboard.debug file). I had not realized that XBoard would consider messages containing phrases like "not found" or "permission denied" as fatal even when they are 'commented out' by a leading '#', because it scans for those even before starting to parse WB protocol. And neither had I realized that UCI engines could sent such messages. Anyway, the print statement should have been removed after I was done debugging, or at least should have been made subject to some debug or log option being switched on. (This explains why WinBoard 4.6.2 did not seem to have it: it used an older Polyglot.)

I posted a Polyglot that fixes this (v2.0.3) at

http://hgm.nubati.net/polyglot.exe

I will use this to replace the Polyglot 2.0.2 in the WinBoard 4.8.0 installer, to stop spreading the defective 2.0.2.

Ok. I will replace Polyglot and test. Thanks for your help.

[Carlos777]

I posted a Polyglot that fixes this (v2.0.3) at

http://hgm.nubati.net/polyglot.exe

I will use this to replace the Polyglot 2.0.2 in the WinBoard 4.8.0 installer, to stop spreading the defective 2.0.2.

I downloaded polyglot and replaced the old one but WB crashed.

Do I have to uninstall 4.8b and reinstall a new version? Is it available?

[JoshPettus]

Thanks Harm, I'll put the update in the xboard package too