Elements of the ULTIMATE Chess GUI?

[phhnguyen]

...
What is it that you wish to do that you can't do with any of the current GUIs?

I, for one, want fun. Chess is a game and some people have taken it so seriously that it's a chore for them to run tournaments just to get some numbers that spell some elo difference, that could have been gotten by someone else instead of them, and they don't even realize it.

For some fun I'd want to see the realization of my idea:

Mixed engines.

The problem that we currently have is that chess entities are fixed. Stockfish is always Stockfish and Komodo is always Komodo.

Imagine that Houdini starts the game and that it switches to Komodo after a 0.40 centi-pawn advantage is reached or to Stockfish if you go below -0.20 for defense, or whatever.

Imagine an engine that becomes another after every 20 moves of the game.

An engine that only appears and makes a move after some other engine has made a capture, or was put in check.

This would be really fun to watch in games, as the super-solid chess entity that started a game may suddenly go bonkers and win with a surprise king attack that the original never saw coming, or you can put to use that super-speculative personality of your engine because once it reaches that winning position it will not give it away because it no longer keeps playing crazy but switches to an engine that can finish the game but wouldn't have reached that position in the first place.

I wouldn't be surprised if some combination of this concept made appear a chess entity much stronger than the Komodos, Stockfishes and Houdinis of today, not only by fusing their strength, but perhaps throwing it a Hanibbal, Andcacs or Fizbo whenever it's pertinent and they'd play a striking move that the top engines would prune.

Is this an element of the ULTIMATE Chess GUI?

Doubtful, but I think users have to think what they want that they don't have already and ask for it instead of bloating something with stuff they already have just so they don't have to open one more GUI to do the job.

I am very interested in that idea and have been managing to implement it for the next release of BanksiaGUI. Thanks

[CMCanavessi]

I'm still looking for a low-latency GUI (Arena is an example of the opposite) that would have the same flexibility that Arena has regarding tournaments, that is that you can save them in a file that would contain all the info, so you can load it whenever you want, you can play some games, then stop, load another tournament, play some games, stop, power off the pc, turn it on again, resume the 1st tournament, edit the list of participants and it would automatically adjust the schedule, etc etc. So far all the GUIs that I've found will just have the option of running 1 tournament, but when you want to create another, the previous one will disappear and you'll lose everything.

Another thing that would be great, is having an option to automatically re-run (replay) games that finish in an abnormal way (be it time forfeits, illegal moves, engine crashes, etc) with some sort of sub-option to save the games that finished in an abnormal way in a different pgn (or even discard them), so the main tournament pgn only contains "good" games.
I don't mind editing .txt files, I do it with Arena all the time.

[JohnW]

Support for electronic chessboards like DGT and Certabo without the need for the software that currently runs between gui and board.
A good database management system to save games similar to the Chessbase software that comes with Fritz but not proprietary.
Ability to annotate a game similar to what Fritz can do but better so that it can review my games, tell me where I made mistakes and what I should have done.

[hgm]

I'm still looking for a low-latency GUI (Arena is an example of the opposite) that would have the same flexibility that Arena has regarding tournaments, that is that you can save them in a file that would contain all the info, so you can load it whenever you want, you can play some games, then stop, load another tournament, play some games, stop, power off the pc, turn it on again, resume the 1st tournament, edit the list of participants and it would automatically adjust the schedule, etc etc. So far all the GUIs that I've found will just have the option of running 1 tournament, but when you want to create another, the previous one will disappear and you'll lose everything.

So you apparently never 'found' WinBoard / XBoard.

Not sure what you expect from editing the list of participants of an ongoing tournament, though. WinBoard allows you to replace a participant, either with or without replay of all games it already did.

Another thing that would be great, is having an option to automatically re-run (replay) games that finish in an abnormal way (be it time forfeits, illegal moves, engine crashes, etc) with some sort of sub-option to save the games that finished in an abnormal way in a different pgn (or even discard them), so the main tournament pgn only contains "good" games.
I don't mind editing .txt files, I do it with Arena all the time.

This is an interesting idea. And it should not be very difficult to implement. But it would expose you to the risk of a tournament getting stuck because of a broken engine that will forfeit all its games. So that the first game it plays will be replayed forever.

[CMCanavessi]

This is an interesting idea. And it should not be very difficult to implement. But it would expose you to the risk of a tournament getting stuck because of a broken engine that will forfeit all its games. So that the first game it plays will be replayed forever.

That's easily fixed with another option of "max number of replays" and then it continues.

[hgm]

Perhaps this could be the only option: /replays=N , with default N=0. The rejected games could be saved on a file with a name derived from the file where the successful games are saved, by appending "_rejects" to that filename. The option would be persistent, and saved in the tournament file, so that tournaments that run simultaneously can use different settings for this option.