Banksia GUI released

[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.

[Javier Ros]

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

I have used the new feature and works perfectly if you play the whole tournament in one session, but if you Stop, Quit the program and Resume it later, the Gpu concurrency is not well computed and it plays simultaneous Gpu games at the same time, with a different schedule than the programmed originally.

Best regards.

[huanhuan]

Ordo is used more widely than Bayeselo. So in my opinion there should be an option to choose from, whether users will go for Ordo or Bayeselo.

Elo's calculations using Bayeselo are too compressed, which is why so many people use Ordo.

Thanks,

[Modern Times]

Elo's calculations using Bayeselo are too compressed, which is why so many people use Ordo.

Thanks,

I'd say the opposite is true. Ordo's ratings are too expanded or exaggerated, take your pick. I prefer Bayeselo.

But yes offering both is a good option.