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It works. Many thanks Greg!

That's right.  If your games are all playing from the starting position, you would just paste those two lines over and over again.

Thanks a lot. What I don't understand how many repeats will there be? Does it involve copy pasting the two lines over and over again?

The control file is a tab-delimited text file.  The first row is the header row identifying what is in each column.  Each row after is a game that will be played.

The required columns are:

Game - the filename of a saved-game file (*.sgf)

Engine1 - the engine playing player 1 ("ChessV", "Fairy-Max", etc.)

Engine2 - the engine playing player 2 ("ChessV", "Fairy-Max", etc.)

Time Control - the time controls (“1:30” would be entire game in 1 minute 30 seconds, “0:10+2” would be a base time of 10 seconds, plus an increment of 2 seconds for each move.)

Other columns are optional:

ID - If you want to identify the games in some special way.  By default they will just be identified by row number.

Variation - The variation of play (“None”, “Small”, “Medium”, or “Large”.  Default is None.)

Player1 and Player2 - How you want the sides identified for purposes of counting up statistics.  By default, it will use the engine names.  Which is reasonable if the purpose of the test is to pit ChessV against Fairy-Max and see which one does better.  For ChessV vs. ChessV, it won’t accomplish much.  In your case, you are testing Augmented Knight vs. Extra Pawn, so name your player accordingly.  Also note this can do variable substitution in the form of #{variable}, so for testing different armies, you would specify #{WhiteArmy} for player 1 and #{BlackArmy} for player two.

For your purposes, let’s say you have two saved game files - WhiteAugmented.sgf and BlackAugmented.sgf.  They don’t need any moves in them unless you want to have multiple files from different start positions.  Given this, your control file could look like this:

Game    Engine1    Engine2    Time Control    Player1    Player2    Variation
WhiteAugmented.sgf    ChessV    ChessV    0:30    Augmented Knight    Extra Pawn    Small
BlackAugmented.sgf    ChessV    ChessV    0:30    Extra Pawn    Augmented Knight    Small

 

I have whatched a few games today, engine vs engine mode, and chessV2.2 is definetly a marvel. Extremelly fun! Big congratilations!

I want to try batch mode on Enep to find out which side is better. I'd bet on the side with the extra pawn based on the few games I watched with ChessV 1, but who knows. For that I'm asked for a control file. How do I write one?

 

Ah, I forgot this detail. They don't all have the same castling rules :(!

Actually, this does not quite work.  Waffle Chess has a unusual castling rule (which is why it was not included.)  I had planned to add support for "Fast Castling" but it didn't make it into this release.  Probably it will be in the next one.

@Kevin Pacey

I have noticed the new version (maybe from before) Hannibal Chess & Frog Chess are present but not Waffle Chess.

I have created a script, which is quite easy. If you are curious to adding it into your copy of chessV2.2 there you go:

 

Game 'Waffle Chess' : 'Generic 10x8'
{
Invented = "2017";
InventedBy = "Kevin Pacey";
Symmetry = MirrorSymmetry;

SetGameVariables
{
Array = "rnbwqkwbnr/pppppppppp/10/10/10/10/PPPPPPPPPP/RNBWQKWBNR";
Castling = "Standard";
PawnDoubleMove = true;
EnPassant = true;
PromotionTypes = "QRBNW";
}

AddPieceTypes
{
AddChessPieceTypes();
AddPieceType( Phoenix, "Waffle", "W", 285, 285 );
}
}

 

 

Well I actually don't know the invention year :)!

Hi James.  Thanks for the post.  If you had the issue, it is likely other will as well.  It is good to know an uninstall is required.  I will edit my annoncement post to add this note.  I wonder if I can modify the installer to do this automatically ...

Greg: I've installed ChessV 2.2 on my Windows 10 computer. When I execute it through either the executable or through the generated icons It seems to start, but never comes up. Has anyone else had this problem. I have not tried compiling the sources yet. Is that a logical next step. NOTE: I uninstalled the older version and re-installed V2.2 and now it works fine. Sorry for the comment.

BUG ALERT: Do not set the transposition table size to anything larger than 1 GB.  If you chose a size larger than 1 GB, you will only get 16 MB (no matter how much RAM you actually have.)  This will be fixed in a future release.

I'm not sure, I don't really use WinBoard.  You specify the engines with /fcp and /scp switches (first chess program and second chess program.)  If you don't specify them on the command line, I believe it will ask you.  You don't neeed to make two copies of ChessV - you can point both to the same executable.  Then, somewhere in the user interface, are options to set engine parameters.

@Greg

I'm quite sure I did not made myself clear earlier, so the question was: How would setting up winboard play by 2 ChessV engines, one with small variation anoter with medium work :)? Thaks!...

I have found it Greg!... No trouble! But how do I put things together now?

@Greg

Where do I download winboard?

I have already downloaded the new version. Thanks again for your excellent work. I think the released date mentioned on your website has the wrong year.

Watch ChessV acting in all its glory!

That's right, that should work.  And the Variation of Play parameter can be set through the Winboard interface.

It would be interesting to compare the small and medium variations of play. Greg has told me that it is not possible internally. But I think winboard can accept two *.exe files. It would not care that it is the same engine with diffret parameters. Is that corect?

ChessV 2.2 Released

The newest version of ChessV has finally be released and is available for download here.

New Features

• About 30 new variants have been added. The total is now over 100.
• Playing strength has been increased significantly.
• The engine now has a few configuration options:
  
  
  • Variation of Play - When set to "None", ChessV is completely deterministic as it was with previous versions. Options "Small", "Medium", and "Large" use various means to increase the variety. Small should not weaken the playing strength although higher settings probably will.
  
  
  • Weakening - A setting from 0 to 15 to reduce the strength of the engine
  
  
  • Transposition Table Size - This is now configurable from 16 MB to 4 GB
  
  
• The ChessV engine can now be used separately from the GUI if you wish to use it under a different GUI, such as WinBoard. The separate engine is ChessV.Engine.exe
• The power of the scripting language has been increased. 23 of the included games are now implemented with the scripting language.
• Various tools have been included such as a basic facility for running games in batch mode for testing and analysis.
• Lots of bugs have been fixed. Thanks to all those who helped with testing and reporting issues!

IMPORTANT: If you have a previous version installed you should uninstall it first. (This only applies to versions installed with an installer. If you used one of the test builds by unzipping and running you should be fine.)

Hi, Carlos.  Thank you for finding and reporting these.  Good catches!

I was able to fix numbers 1, 2, and 3 in just a few minutes.

Unfortunately, #4 is not really a bug.  The chess board display does not scale - the resolution of your screen must be large enough to accomodate it.  Perhaps your screen resolution is too low to fit a 12 x 12 board (or you have a zoom setting turned on.)  I want to improve this, part of which will be using the scalable vector graphics that H. G. made.  Currently the piece graphics are bitmaps so they would not scale well.  Some option to shrink would be nice anyway, but it will not make it into this version.

But if you find any other bugs, please let me know :)  I am going out of town for a few days and plan to make an official release of 2.2 when I get back if no new issues have been discovered.

Thanks, Greg, for answering. Hopefully soon some mobile apps developer could join and help in your ChessV undertaking.

I'm sorry to tell you that I have found these bugs:

1. In Ministers Chess setup the i-rook and the h-knight from White side are switched.

2. In Sac Chess both kings cannot castle.

3. When rotating the boards the numerical coordinates remain unchanged.

4. In Gross Chess the window size does not fit proportionally to the PC screen.

Aside of that, I'm enjoying immensely your masterpiece!

Hi Aurelian

This may belong under the Hannibal Chess thread; I'd consider multiple setup positions for any number of my CV inventions at some point, once I'm sure I know how to get that available to Game Courier (GC) play.

 I think the type of elephant you've diagrammed is known as the lieutenant piece in Spartan Chess (that is, it's a ferfil that also has available to it non-capturing moves one step left or right orthogonally, if I understand the notation right). I've used that piece type already in a CV invention of mine (called Wide Chess, 12x8, hardly played yet - although I played you a game of it long ago). I'm not sure it would make Hannibal Chess (the way it stands) at least as playable, or more popular, in GC play - perhaps the straight ferfils, when in the current setup, are already pretty potent (though I know I mentioned people on the whole seem to prefer adding in powerful pieces, in CVs).

One other thing I concluded about popular CVs on GC from cursory study of the 1200+ GC games played list is that the most popular CVs on GC tend not to have many asymmetric-moving pieces (if any at all) in their setups; IMO, this is in line with Fergus' suggested guidelines for trying to design good CVs. Someone I've chatted with once told me they don't like to 'fight against their own pieces' (as opposed to those of the opponent), though they didn't like even Nightriders (or Waffles [WA]{!}) for that reason. Maybe it was mostly their own viewpoint, as Nightriders seem fairly popular with players, and not too irregular, perhaps.

Sorry guys but I don't see any video.

Kevin, would you consider electing among several eligible initial position, hannibal chess 2  for example(akin to fisher 960 )?! Why choose when you can enrich?

Also I'd really perfer this elephant, but this is probably a matter of taste:

x              x

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    mEm

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x              x