Banksia GUI released

[Gabor Szots]

A couple of times I tried to use the Banksia GUI for running a tournament but each time it exited after a couple of games.

I wonder if there is a way to determine the reason. I have a 64-bit Windows 10, Hungarian.

[Nordlandia]

Thanks for the replies. I think you helped me out and indeed adjudication do work as intended.

My initial plan was to probe 5 or 6-men during search and set 7-piece syzygy for adjudication. By doing it this way, 7-piece syzygy won't consume all available RAM.

[Rom77]

6) It is used ply in purpose since it is a bit more accurate than full move counter and it seems a bit more suitable for tech reports.

What your opinion about 4) and 6)?

At first I wanted to write that chess players always use the number of moves, not ply, but then I remembered that Plycount is used in PGN format. So, probably, the correct answer will depend on who really needs to use these numbers. I did not have a definite opinion on this issue.

4) Concurrency can set to zero only from the Tournament panel but not when creating the tournament. If a user doesn't want to play immediately after creating, he can't untick the checkbox play. When reloading the tournament, if concurrency will be changed to 1 if it is zero. I did it in purpose to reduce the change of making an error: the tournament does not play but the user gets confused

I, too, was confused when the stopped tournament suddenly picked up and played. But I also understand what you want to avoid. Is there any way to separate these problems? Maybe the tournament should go into "Stop" mode, after the end of the last game with the "Concurrency:" = 0 mode? And only after clicking "Resume" can it be continued? Therefore, if at the moment there is some simple solution to the problem, then I would be grateful if it were implemented. If not, I do not insist. I will just remember such a surprise.

I want to report another issue. Even if adjudication on the "Score threshold" is set in the tournament, in some games it does not work. Although it should. The game continues until the mate. Often it is very tightened. After such cases, in the next games of the tournament, usually everything is fine again. Then again, "Score threshold" does not work. And so it alternates several times. I don’t understand why this is happening.

[phhnguyen]

A couple of times I tried to use the Banksia GUI for running a tournament but each time it exited after a couple of games.

I wonder if there is a way to determine the reason. I have a 64-bit Windows 10, Hungarian.

Crashing is always hard to find reasons. I am so interested in too. Can you try:
- Find crash logs. Just follow some guides on the Internet, such as this link https://windowsinstructed.com/access-wi ... s-windows/. Try to find logs mentioning about BanksiaGUI
- Try to understand the reason and/or send them to me to check.

You can help us to find the cause by making a limited tournament. That can detect if BSG or engines, external data are the reasons:
- Select only good, famous, long time tested engines such as Stockfish and Komodo
- Turn off all openings, logs, syzygy... In the below image you may see I unticked almost all checkboxes
- Create few games only (set games/pair a small number)
- Set low values for concurrency, hash, cores...
- Set game time as a very short one, thus you can try quickly many tournaments.

If the above tournament can play fully (without any crash), you may increase the number of games, concurrency, add one/more engines, try again until you see a crash, then verify the parameters and/or engines that causes the crash.

Thanks for help.

[BrendanJNorman]

A couple of times I tried to use the Banksia GUI for running a tournament but each time it exited after a couple of games.

I wonder if there is a way to determine the reason. I have a 64-bit Windows 10, Hungarian.

Yeah. I REALLY love Banksia, but had to give up on it, due to endless crashes when running tournaments.

I suspect it is related to Windows 10 being an absolute JUNK O.S.

When will Microsoft release something which is modern, but as easy to use as XP/Win 7 were?

[RubiChess]

I'm no big fan of Windows but I would not blame the OS for crashes of one special application.

Regarding Banksia I have a question or feature request: I ran a tournament yesterday (without crashes) with concurrency=1 and I find it annoying that I always have to open the running game for viewing by double-clicking the game in the tounaments game list. There should be some "always show running game" option. Maybe there is but I haven't found it.

Andreas

[phhnguyen]

I, too, was confused when the stopped tournament suddenly picked up and played. But I also understand what you want to avoid. Is there any way to separate these problems? Maybe the tournament should go into "Stop" mode, after the end of the last game with the "Concurrency:" = 0 mode? And only after clicking "Resume" can it be continued? Therefore, if at the moment there is some simple solution to the problem, then I would be grateful if it were implemented. If not, I do not insist. I will just remember such a surprise.

I have been thinking about a simple message. At the moment when concurrency is set to zero, the box of the number will be shown with a red border. Perhaps, I will make it more clear.

I want to report another issue. Even if adjudication on the "Score threshold" is set in the tournament, in some games it does not work. Although it should. The game continues until the mate. Often it is very tightened. After such cases, in the next games of the tournament, usually everything is fine again. Then again, "Score threshold" does not work. And so it alternates several times. I don’t understand why this is happening.

Thanks a lot for the report. Perhaps, I found the bug: BSG compares engine scores with the threshold. However, when it is a mate, score values will be small and far below the threshold. I took care of mating cases but created a bug code. All will be fixed for the next release.

[phhnguyen]

A couple of times I tried to use the Banksia GUI for running a tournament but each time it exited after a couple of games.

I wonder if there is a way to determine the reason. I have a 64-bit Windows 10, Hungarian.

Yeah. I REALLY love Banksia, but had to give up on it, due to endless crashes when running tournaments.

I suspect it is related to Windows 10 being an absolute JUNK O.S.

When will Microsoft release something which is modern, but as easy to use as XP/Win 7 were?

Thank you for the feedback.
I am struggling to reproduce crashes on Windows thus I need help from you all. If you could, please help by following my instructions in the first post of this page (the reply to Gabor Szots) about finding/reading crash logs and try some limited tournaments to find out the reason. Thanks again

[phhnguyen]

I'm no big fan of Windows but I would not blame the OS for crashes of one special application.

Regarding Banksia I have a question or feature request: I ran a tournament yesterday (without crashes) with concurrency=1 and I find it annoying that I always have to open the running game for viewing by double-clicking the game in the tounaments game list. There should be some "always show running game" option. Maybe there is but I haven't found it.

Andreas

There are several ways to see playing games:

- Manual: double click (as you did) to a playing game to open it in a game tab. The advantage is that you will see what you want only
- Auto open playing games: in tournament panel (usually located on the left side, if you can't see it, open via menu -> Windows -> Docks -> Tournament) select from the dropdown next to the button Stop/Resume "Open games" or "Open & View" (Fig. 1), BSG will auto-open playing games to view. The difference between those modes is that the first one won't take focus (so you can continue to watch the current game, the new opening game is in the background) when the second one takes focus. The disadvantage of this way is that you may open too many games when your concurrency is high
- View by popup Playing games, open via menu -> Windows -> Playing games. It can show any playing games as Fig. 2. The advantage is that you can watch all games concurrently on one screen


Fig 1


Fig 2

[RubiChess]

- Auto open playing games: in tournament panel (usually located on the left side, if you can't see it, open via menu -> Windows -> Docks -> Tournament) select from the dropdown next to the button Stop/Resume "Open games" or "Open & View" (Fig. 1), BSG will auto-open playing games to view. The difference between those modes is that the first one won't take focus (so you can continue to watch the current game, the new opening game is in the background) when the second one takes focus. The disadvantage of this way is that you may open too many games when your concurrency is high

That's it. Just found out that it is important to first! select the "Open and view" option and after that start/resume the tournament. Switching to "open and view" when the games are already running doesn't change anything or at least not before next game.
Maybe it would be more intuitive to place the option dropdown box on the left and the start/resume button on the right?

Thanks for your GUI.
Andreas