Banksia GUI released

[hgm]

The only effect would be that users avoid CECP engines.

And so they should, if these are crappy. They might as well complain that some engines play poor moves, and require GUIs to run Stockfish in the background to correct engine blunders, to make poor engines look better.

[Ras]

And so they should, if these are crappy.

Uhm yeah. Maybe they also ditch crappy GUIs whose authors follow such a philosophy - and use Banksia instead of Winboard.

[hgm]

Indeed, it is a sad fact that immoral GUI developers could try to score points by implementing features that are damaging the interests of the computer-chess community as a whole. All we can do is appeal to them to not put their own interests above the common good, and do the right thing.

I, for one, would never betray the community just for the purpose of promoting WinBoard. If people don't want to use it because of that, tough luck. Life is like that. But if criminals prosper by preying on the innocent, it still would be no reason for me to join the criminals, and rather go down with the innocents.

[Ras]

and do the right thing.

If "the computer chess community" had had any trouble with such workarounds, they would have done the right thing and defined that right in the protocol from the beginning. But nobody cared when it would have mattered, and now it's just one more point of hassle when using CECP engines. Let's be real, they won't be updated, not least because a lot of them are legacy software anyway.

[hgm]

Well, if people were happy to see 327.60 or 79.98 scores then, why should it suddenly be so important to show them something different now?

It is my task as a GUI developer to provide the opportunity for what the engine might want to do. That opprtunity now exists: they can either present the user with a mate score like #7, or with some weird number. So they even have a choice.

Who cares about legacy engines anyway?

[Ras]

Well, if people were happy to see 327.60 or 79.98 scores then, why should it suddenly be so important to show them something different now?

Because GUIs in 2020 are expected to be better than something from the early 90s. This is called "progress", and Banksia is aiming for becoming something better.

Also, people were never "happy" to see that, it was just that GUI devs didn't bother (just like with all the CLI and .rc/ini file nonsense - for a GUI!). Hardly astonishing, given that Unix/Linux where Xboard came from aren't exactly known for devs with UI design knowledge, even less so in the 90s.

[hgm]

Well, if people are not happy to see it, why do engines print it? The GUI or its author is not to blame for that! Long before I was involved with WinBoard my engine Joker already printed mate-in-N as 10000+N, so that I could easily see the DTM without having to do a calculation. Worked in every GUI. (I had tried M6 for mate-in-6 first, but that turned out to make the GUI completely ignore the thinking output... The PV is free format in CECP, but not the scores.)

Progress comes from discarding crappy old engines that print crappy mate scores. Not by making GUIs jump through hoops in order to prolong the misery of having them around.

As for the ini files... It is not how I would design things, but there are people around that seem, to like them. I don't know if you have seen the discussion about the SCID engine configuration dialog, but when the developer proposes a GUI, along comes a user with as a first complaint that it doesn't offer an option for editing the engine ini file...

[Ras]

Progress comes from discarding crappy old engines that print crappy mate scores.

It's up to the user to decide, and e.g. engine nostalgy would be a reason. Other GUIs take your idea to the next level and got rid of CECP at all, among them Droidfish, Picochess, and some dedicated units running ARM-Linux.

[hgm]

Weird mate scores is part of the nostalgy. Hiding the engine idiosyncracies would be a disservice to those users.

And it does make little sense for a GUI to implement a zillion different protocols. Just use adapters.

[zenpawn]

It seems that Banksia does not recognize Winboard engines as being capable of playing chess960.