Engines that won't work with CuteChess

[JohnW]

Have any of you noticed that certain Engines just don't work with Cutechess v1.2.0?
I have had to unregister the engines below because of various issues:

ProDeo 2.0 just refuses to move, works fine in Fritz 17 and Arena though
Same with Rebel 6.0 uci and the old Mephisto uci versions (e.g Mephisto Roma, Mephisto Dallas etc). All work fine in Fritz and Arena though.
Cinnamon 2.0 pops up an error with red x

[supersharp77]

Have any of you noticed that certain Engines just don't work with Cutechess v1.2.0?
I have had to unregister the engines below because of various issues:

ProDeo 2.0 just refuses to move, works fine in Fritz 17 and Arena though
Same with Rebel 6.0 uci and the old Mephisto uci versions (e.g Mephisto Roma, Mephisto Dallas etc). All work fine in Fritz and Arena though.
Cinnamon 2.0 pops up an error with red x

Don't forget you can run Prodeo or the Old rebels as either winboard or UCI engines with the adaptor...if UCI is not working I would try to run as a "pure winboard" engine...AR

[JohnW]

Thanks, I can get them to work fine in other guis. I want to use them specifically with the cute chess command line interface though.

[Rebel]

Thanks, I can get them to work fine in other guis. I want to use them specifically with the cute chess command line interface though.

With older versions don't try the -concurrency option.

[Ras]

With older versions don't try the -concurrency option.

That looks like a workaround for a race condition in the UCI parser. That kind of bug may hit engines that use a dedicated input thread and discard UCI commands other than isready/stop/quit during search if not carefully implemented. A strong hint would be that this shows only if you load all logical cores of your CPU, e.g. eight games in parallel on a quadcore with hyperthreading.

[JohnW]

Thanks, I can get them to work fine in other guis. I want to use them specifically with the cute chess command line interface though.

With older versions don't try the -concurrency option.

Thanks, I am not using that.

[Rebel]

With older versions don't try the -concurrency option.

That looks like a workaround for a race condition in the UCI parser. That kind of bug may hit engines that use a dedicated input thread and discard UCI commands other than isready/stop/quit during search if not carefully implemented. A strong hint would be that this shows only if you load all logical cores of your CPU, e.g. eight games in parallel on a quadcore with hyperthreading.

It's not the case, the reason is that older versions keep track of a couple of info-files, removing them allowed the use of the -concurrency option.

[Rebel]

Thanks, I can get them to work fine in other guis. I want to use them specifically with the cute chess command line interface though.

With older versions don't try the -concurrency option.

Thanks, I am not using that.

Can you post the cutechess batchfile, I then can try to emulate. One other thing that springs to mind :

cutechess-cli engine name=Rebel6 cmd=Rebel6.exe dir=somewhere proto=uci

Don't use cmd=Rebel6.exe but cmd=rebeluci.exe

[JohnW]

Thanks, I can get them to work fine in other guis. I want to use them specifically with the cute chess command line interface though.

With older versions don't try the -concurrency option.

Thanks, I am not using that.

Can you post the cutechess batchfile, I then can try to emulate. One other thing that springs to mind :

cutechess-cli engine name=Rebel6 cmd=Rebel6.exe dir=somewhere proto=uci

Don't use cmd=Rebel6.exe but cmd=rebeluci.exe

I register the engines via the CuteChess gui then I create something like:

cutechess-cli -engine conf="ProDeo2.0" -engine conf="Rybka 3" -pgnout "C:\CHESS ENGINES\ChessMatches.pgn" -each tc=0/1:00+1

This problem isn't just with using the cli, ProDeo2.0 refuses to move when using the cutechess gui. I reregistered Rebel6 and for some reason it worked just fine this morning.