New engine: belofte

[ydebilloez]

Dear Gabor,

You are not bothering me at all. If people are having trouble using my program or my site, I should do a better job at explaining or organising my site.

To give an example, you downloaded 0.9.12 instead of 0.9.14, this was my error. I uploaded only in one place instead of two.
Another user wanted to use belofte with Fritz... but the windows version is only WB and no UCI.... the confusing setup is my error again.
The site macchess is talking about chess on mac, but the latest version is windows/linux only.... my error again.

Please continue bothering me all the time until I get it right. Other people might just abandon it without making any comment. Thanks for your patience and your feedback. It is thanks to your feedback that I can correct things so there is less confusion and better quality.

Regards,
Yves

[Gabor Szots]

Is there a way to switch off logging and autosave?

And it seems to me that Belofte in WB mode is uncapable of playing under fractions of a minute time controls. E.g. 40 moves in 0:30 minutes or 0:30+0.2 (Fischer). Is that a parsing problem?

Cheers,

[ydebilloez]

Is there a way to switch off logging and autosave?

Good idea for next release.

And it seems to me that Belofte in WB mode is uncapable of playing under fractions of a minute time controls. E.g. 40 moves in 0:30 minutes or 0:30+0.2 (Fischer). Is that a parsing problem?

The command "level moves m:s n" is supported. However, any element has to be an integer. So 0.2 (fraction of second) Fischer increment is not supported. (for now) Anyway, I use the time function to calculate elapsed time and the engine will always cut search at close to a second. Will have to use fraction of time that is only supported cross-platform as of C++11 I believe. Good idea for upcoming release.

I was reported a bug in the calculation of time in bullet style tournaments. The fastest time I used for testing is 60s + 2s. Will be fixed in next release.

[Gabor Szots]

Just noticed that Belofte uses 1 thread even when not on move, while it uses 2 while calculating. This is a 4-core machine and 2 cores are occupied by other tournaments.

[ydebilloez]

Just noticed that Belofte uses 1 thread even when not on move, while it uses 2 while calculating. This is a 4-core machine and 2 cores are occupied by other tournaments.

Belofte is launching multiple threads for its operation:

• Main program is accepting UI input. It is just waiting for command input. Estimated CPU usage: less than 0.001 %

• A thread is running to calculate time expiration. Is pausing all the time, waking up for a few lines of code and sleeping again. This thread is not running when in fixed depth mode. Estimated CPU usage: less than 0.001%

• A thread is running to calculate moves.

• A thread is running for pondering. (Not implemented yet).

So no multiple threads are being used at this moment for searching. This will be done in an upcoming update.

Regards,

[Gabor Szots]

Just noticed that Belofte uses 1 thread even when not on move, while it uses 2 while calculating. This is a 4-core machine and 2 cores are occupied by other tournaments.

Belofte is launching multiple threads for its operation:

• Main program is accepting UI input. It is just waiting for command input. Estimated CPU usage: less than 0.001 %

• A thread is running to calculate time expiration. Is pausing all the time, waking up for a few lines of code and sleeping again. This thread is not running when in fixed depth mode. Estimated CPU usage: less than 0.001%

• A thread is running to calculate moves.

• A thread is running for pondering. (Not implemented yet).

So no multiple threads are being used at this moment for searching. This will be done in an upcoming update.

Regards,

That's odd. I observe 25 % CPU usage (1 core) even when it's not Belofte's move. That is with 2+1 TC.

[ydebilloez]

Belofte 0.9.16 has been released.

Following changes:

• Uniform exe with both UCI and XBoard support.

• Correction on parameter passing to engine, now correctly reads uci/xboard commands on launch. (linux version)

• For windows version, passing the parameter uci when launching the engine is recommended. If no parameter is passed, Belofte windows will finalize initialisation before reading the first command and is thus presenting the board and the prompt before first command.

• Support for bullet games.

Uci version seems a bit stronger as it has a slightly more correct time management.

Is there a way to switch off logging and autosave?

Good idea for next release.

New release 0.9.16 with autosave and logging disabled by default. Issue command

Code: Select all

debug logging

or

Code: Select all

debug autosave

to reenable.

And it seems to me that Belofte in WB mode is uncapable of playing under fractions of a minute time controls. E.g. 40 moves in 0:30 minutes or 0:30+0.2 (Fischer). Is that a parsing problem?

I was reported a bug in the calculation of time in bullet style tournaments. The fastest time I used for testing is 60s + 2s. Will be fixed in next release.

New release 0.9.16 with correction of bullet games. Tested at inf/60 and 40/60.

[Gabor Szots]

How can I download the sources in one zip file? I did it once but I've forgotten how. In the src folder I only find separate files.

[Gabor Szots]

How can I download the sources in one zip file? I did it once but I've forgotten how. In the src folder I only find separate files.

I recall 0.9.14 sources were here: http://macchess.internetcontact.be/downloads/. However, 0.9.16 sources are not there.

[ydebilloez]

You can download the complete project from sourceforge at any time at:

https://sourceforge.net/p/belofte/gitre ... ster/tree/ (and select download snapshot)

From the command line, you can take a git snapshot (all sources + documentation) by following command.
You must have git installed.

Code: Select all

git clone https://git.code.sf.net/p/belofte/gitrepo belofte-gitrepo

I even posted an intermediate update with a number of fixes in preparation of the next release.
You can get the latest source code (no compile) from here: https://sourceforge.net/p/belofte/gitre ... 9.17/tree/