Terminating the ChessGUI project.

[Matthias Gemuh]

ChessGUI 0.199a is out there.

A misplaced line of code was sometimes preventing the launching of engines in ChessGUI 0.199.

Matthias.

[Jouni]

Possible bug in all versions: When I play 20 games match from 10 Nunn positions (alternate colours) ChessGUI repeats 5 first games 4 times!

Jouni

[Matthias Gemuh]

Possible bug in all versions: When I play 20 games match from 10 Nunn positions (alternate colours) ChessGUI repeats 5 first games 4 times!

Jouni

There is a "Randomizer" tab in tournament setup window.
Set that to "Sequential per Cycle".

In future, ChessGUI will do that automatically when number of cycles to play is equal to number of positions in startpositions file.

At present, ChessGUI does not yet keep track of which startpositions have already been played when Randomizer is set to random.

Matthias.

[Jouni]

Hi,

Actually "Sequential per Cycle" was set. But after more careful pgn reading bug is this: After first 9 games correctly repeated with both colors then first position is repeated again twice (position 10 not played at all).

Jouni

[Matthias Gemuh]

Hi,

Actually "Sequential per Cycle" was set. But after more careful pgn reading bug is this: After first 9 games correctly repeated with both colors then first position is repeated again twice (position 10 not played at all).

Jouni

When ChessGUI reaches last startposition before last cycle, it wraps round to first startposition. I'll check if it now wraps round too early.

Matthias.

[PawnStormZ]

    Hi Matthias.  I tried running a few tourneys at really fast tc: game in 2 sec. I planned on running several thousand games but the program crashed after 320 games. I tried this 3 times, and each time it crashed after game 320. I have plenty of free RAM and HD space on my Win7 64 I7 920. I was using 512 ram for the engines, with 4 engines in the swiss.
   
    The error msg window only says "EAccessViolation". The title of the window is "Chessgui" and there is an "OK" button that when pressed closes the program. The first 2 times I was using version 198, this last time it was 199a.
   
    On a seperate subject, would you be able to make the move increment some fraction of a second? Now the smallest incr is 1 sec which makes it not possible to play really fast games with incr because after 60 moves per side, you are already using more than 2 minutes for the game. How about incr in 1/10 or even 1/100 sec steps?
   
        Thanks again for your efforts with this fine program!
   

[Matthias Gemuh]

    Hi Matthias.  I tried running a few tourneys at really fast tc: game in 2 sec. I planned on running several thousand games but the program crashed after 320 games. I tried this 3 times, and each time it crashed after game 320. I have plenty of free RAM and HD space on my Win7 64 I7 920. I was using 512 ram for the engines, with 4 engines in the swiss.
   
    The error msg window only says "EAccessViolation". The title of the window is "Chessgui" and there is an "OK" button that when pressed closes the program. The first 2 times I was using version 198, this last time it was 199a.
   
    On a seperate subject, would you be able to make the move increment some fraction of a second? Now the smallest incr is 1 sec which makes it not possible to play really fast games with incr because after 60 moves per side, you are already using more than 2 minutes for the game. How about incr in 1/10 or even 1/100 sec steps?
   
        Thanks again for your efforts with this fine program!
   

Hi Pal,

maybe the latest changes in yet unreleased ChessGUI 0.200 solves this type of crash. It sounds like a stack issue.

You are playing Swiss with only 4 engines ?

ChessGUI cannot handle really fast games, so incr of less than 1 sec seems a really strange thing to implement. Have you tried using time odds ? They cannot be set globally however, only per engine.

OK, I shall go below 1 sec for inc.

Matthias.

[Matthias Gemuh]

ChessGUI cannot handle really fast games, so incr of less than 1 sec seems a really strange thing to implement. Have you tried using time odds ? They cannot be set globally however, only per engine.

OK, I shall go below 1 sec for inc.

Matthias.

Going below 1 sec for inc cannot be done satisfactorily for WB engines, though. The "level" command does not support it.

Matthias.

[PawnStormZ]

Hi Matthias. I do not know why you say that "ChessGUI cannot handle really fast games" because it ran my 2-second games fine! Most of the games finish normally, and the time-losses come only if the games get long---like 70-80 moves or more. This is to be expected without increments, and by having a 1/10 or maybe even 5/100 incr most of those would finish too.

I was looking through some of the game-logs and your program seems to keep track of everthing, giving comments about what is happening in great detail. I had a 50-milisecond overstep margin set, and it even said when an engine was over its time and had been "saved" by the margin for several moves.

I think that with the addition of the fractional incr, ChessGui will be very good for fast games too! I only use uci, so it does not matter to me if wb can not use the fractional incr; no harm in having it there for the protocol that can.

The reason only 4 in the swiss is that it was houdini, rybka, critter, and fire; I did not want any "weakies" in there giving away easy points to the others. Stockfish is not in only because it seems to have more trouble with the very short time control. In all three matches houdini was way ahead at the 320 game mark; it really destroys even rybka and fire at the very fast tc.

I look forward to testing the new version when you release it.

Thanks again for your program, and your engagement with its users!

[hgm]

Usually it is better to not tell the engine about sucj very small increments at all, as they might get easily lost in communication delays.