In tournament box, add concurrency setting box. Most of the time when I create a tour, that is the only time that I decide how many concurrency I am going to use and not the value from the setting,
although you can adjust its value while the tour is runing.
That could be done now that only one tournament at a time is allowed. But if we allow more than 1 in the future, this becomes an issue because concurrency is not a tournament-specific feature; it affects all tournaments.
Ferdy wrote:Also set max depth in plies in Opening suites perhaps 100 plies.
Good idea. But even now you can set your own default value in the Settings dialog.
WinBoard is very forgiving in this respect, as it uses the same parser for moves from games and moves from the engine. And one of the design goals is that you should be able to paste almost anything that remotely looks like a collection of Chess moves into WinBoard. Tthis parser would recognize long King steps, King x Rook, O-O, 0-0, OO, 00 all as King-side castling, where coordinate moves have to specify the to-square prefixed with an unambiguous indication of the piece moving there (by coordinates, piece-type ID or ID + line and/or rank disambiguator, possibly separated from it by -, x or :. E.g. e1g1, e1-g1, Kg1, Keg1, K:g1, e1:g1, K1-g1, Kxg1 would all be recognized). It still failed in a case where castlings were written as 0--0, as it parsed the first 0 as move number, and the -- as a null move.
For a missing promotion ID WinBoard assumes the default promotion piece for that variant, which is usually Queen (but a General in Shatranj / Makruk, King in Suicide / Giveaway and deferral in Shogi).
Unfortunately, the more forgiving the GUI, the more careless the engines will get... Perhaps this should be made subject to a work-around option that by default considers all frivolities illegal moves, but can be installed with non-compliant engines to understand their misbehavior
ilari wrote:That could be done now that only one tournament at a time is allowed. But if we allow more than 1 in the future, this becomes an issue because concurrency is not a tournament-specific feature; it affects all tournaments.
You could still allow changing of that global setting from the tournament dialog. I do the same thing in WinBoard for the file on which the tournament games are saved. This is the same file as where other games would be automatically saved, and which could already be controlled from a Save Options dialog. But it was quite annoying in practice to have to go to that dialog every time you were starting a tournament, and wanted to change the file.
1. New tour
2. Select standard variant
3. Select an engine that is able to play standard but not crazyhouse
4. Select engine and press configure to configure the engine, click OK or cancel
5. Select variant crazyhouse
6. Do not select the engine and press the engine config button
hgm wrote:WinBoard is very forgiving in this respect, as it uses the same parser for moves from games and moves from the engine. And one of the design goals is that you should be able to paste almost anything that remotely looks like a collection of Chess moves into WinBoard. Tthis parser would recognize long King steps, King x Rook, O-O, 0-0, OO, 00 all as King-side castling, where coordinate moves have to specify the to-square prefixed with an unambiguous indication of the piece moving there (by coordinates, piece-type ID or ID + line and/or rank disambiguator, possibly separated from it by -, x or :. E.g. e1g1, e1-g1, Kg1, Keg1, K:g1, e1:g1, K1-g1, Kxg1 would all be recognized). It still failed in a case where castlings were written as 0--0, as it parsed the first 0 as move number, and the -- as a null move.
For a missing promotion ID WinBoard assumes the default promotion piece for that variant, which is usually Queen (but a General in Shatranj / Makruk, King in Suicide / Giveaway and deferral in Shogi).
Unfortunately, the more forgiving the GUI, the more careless the engines will get... Perhaps this should be made subject to a work-around option that by default considers all frivolities illegal moves, but can be installed with non-compliant engines to understand their misbehavior
I remember having this conversation before. I know a few engines that had their move output format fixed because cutechess-cli wouldn't accept an invalid format, which is exactly how these issues should be resolved. Of course there are old engines that are never going to be changed, so I understand why Xboard accepts pretty much everything that can be interpreted as a move.
1. New tour
2. Select standard variant
3. Select an engine that is able to play standard but not crazyhouse
4. Select engine and press configure to configure the engine, click OK or cancel
5. Select variant crazyhouse
6. Do not select the engine and press the engine config button
Cute Chess would crash.
Very good catch! The engine selection loses focus when the variant is changed so the configure button should be disabled.
ilari wrote:I know a few engines that had their move output format fixed because cutechess-cli wouldn't accept an invalid format, which is exactly how these issues should be resolved. Of course there are old engines that are never going to be changed, so I understand why Xboard accepts pretty much everything that can be interpreted as a move.
You are right, and I also am a great fan of solving problems where they ly. So I am very unhappy that XBoard has this enormous section for parsing non-compliant engine messages and work arounds for other engine bugs. But the damage was already done, and when I accidentally removed the ability to accept promotion moves without promotion suffix, because I rewrote the move parser, many engines that were no longer developed stopped working. And users do not accept that things that used to work before do not work anymore.
BTW, the reason that XBoard accepts almost any move format from engines is not really intentional, but a side effect from that XBoard accepts any move format from pasting games. So that you can simply copy-paste newspaper articles that contain a game in non-standard format, or a table of moves from the html page of some server website.
Regarding created polyglot book, What is the formula in calculating move weight? What is the minimum move weight that a move will be played when opening order is random? Does the book contains a move with zero weight?
Regarding created polyglot book, What is the formula in calculating move weight? What is the minimum move weight that a move will be played when opening order is random? Does the book contains a move with zero weight?
The polyglot book use has no random, so what is the minimum move weight for it to be played?
