Arena 3.5

Anybody knows how to contact Arena? I went on their website and filled out a contact form but haven't received anything back from them in about a week. Did anybody noticed that some engines in the Arena don't use hash memory. For example, Rybka doesn't use this memory but SOS does. When you use Rybka in the Arena you see 0% in the "Hash" box... I also installed Stockfish 6 and it doesn't use hash memory either. Anybody knows why?

Onegin

Not all engines report hash usage.  The latest Stockfish develoment version does report hash usage, unlike Stockfish 6.

Edit: Stockfish 7 is released! 

I see... So, hashtables is a fundamental thing about computer engines which makes them more efficient and they all use it. I thought so too... The other thing about Arena 3.5 is file and game management. As I understood if you need to move games between files or get rid of some games you open "Game List" in the PGN section of main menu. You, then, select whatever games you need to move,right click, choose "Copy", then open another file and select "Insert" in the right click to append games to this second file. In other words, it is the same as Copy/Paste in normal case and those games are copied temporarily to the Clipboard. If you choose Delete in the right click it just deletes selected games. Did I understand everything correctly? 

Yes, all modern engines use hash tables but not all report the usage to the GUI.

Arena is not that great at file management but the operations you describe should work, in theory.  On my system, Arena will crash if I try to copy and paste ("insert") more than a handful of games using that procedure.  I use Aquarium to manage my database files.

Maybe there's a better way to manage PGN files using Arena that an Arena guru can show us.

Since I'm new to this engine/PGN files/game database business, there should be web sites that have famous games of famous GM's to download...? I've practiced with my own games (saving them in PGN files, editing them and adding comments, analyzing them and appending variations) but you also need to be able to download big PGN files containing many games...

There are some free PGN databases around but the big ones (millions of games) don't work well in Arena, at least not in my experience.  The PGN Mentor website has some manageably sized PGN files that you mght like.

http://www.pgnmentor.com/files.html

Have you looked at SCID vs PC?  It's a free database program that also supports UCI chess engines.  It will easily handle larger databases.

http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/

I can't really add much to what Crappov said about Arena's database features, as I don't use those features much.

Regarding the hashtables, if an engine isn't reporting hash usage to Arena, you can pull up the Windows task manager to see how much memory the engine is using. It won't be exact, since the task manager will show the total of not only the main hashtable memory, but other memory like pawn hashtables and tablebase caches. But if you can mentally subtract out those other items, the number will be close enough to get a rough idea of the hashtable size.

I don't really care how much hash memory engine uses when it's calculating moves I was just surprised to see exact 0 % every time I used Stockfish. It would mean that an engine is NOT using hash tables AT ALL! Which doesn't make any sense since hash tables are an integral part of any chess engine.

Thanks for the web addresses on PGN mentor and databases, I'll definetely check them out.

Arena does have a very convoluted file managing structure. It took me a while to learn how to save games in files and what the difference is between saving a game back to loaded file (which overwrites older version of the same game in the file) and saving game as PGN file which appends game inside the file

In the case of Stockfish 6, I suspect that the engine IS using hash, but it's just not reporting the hash usage to Arena. My guess is that Stockfish 6 was just compiled incorrectly so that the hash usage isn't being reported.

Note that Stockfish 7 does correctly report hash usage to Arena.

So, has anybody ever tried to contact Arena, either creator or some regular programmers?...

I think I might have submitted a bug report in the distant past using the contact form, but it was so long ago I can't even remember if I got a response. I've never seen an e-mail address for any of the guys involved with Arena. I think they like to keep a low profile.

I can't remember ever seeing the main programmer, Martin Blume, posting on the Talkchess forum. One of the testers, Christopher Conkie, posts there once in a blue moon. Probably the most active Talkchess poster among the Arena guys is another tester, Michael Diosi. If you had to get ahold of one of these guys, I'd say your best bet would be to create an account on Talkchess and then try sending a PM to Michael.

However, I must say that it's very probable that the hashtable reporting problem that you noticed is the fault of the engine people and not the Arena people. If the Arena guys read your bug report and think it's not Arena's fault, you may not even get a response.

http://talkchess.com/forum/index.php

Stockfish 7, just released, reports hash usage.  Problem solved! 

Yep, already noted in Post #9.

Missed that. 

That's OK; I'm just wondering if the OP also missed it.

Yeah, I was trying to get in touch with Arena people about hash usage but now I see IT IS an engine problem, so I understand why they didn't get back to me. I'm not worried anymore about hash since it's just a question of reporting what engine does. I understand that all engines use hashtables one way or the other, no problems here. Thank you for explaining this to me. I still want to ask Arena programmers a few questions about interface (how to handle files) so I will try to contact them either through the contact form on their web site or using chess forum that you described. By the way (this is to Crappov...), I've been playing with right mouse click in the Game List: If you do "save (selected) games" and then choose a name of existing file, Arena will append selected games AT THE END of that file. Also, unlike "Copy" and "Insert" games, it should not use clipboard in between (my educated guess). But "Insert" option lets you have inserted games where you want them inside PGN file. So, may be it's clipboard that didn't allow you to copy too many games since it is not supposed to have too much memory in it...

From the Stockfish blog:

Stockfish 7 is out!

• This release is around 60 ELO stronger than Stockfish 6 in self play.
• SMP algorithm has been changed from YBW to Lazy SMP.
• Gary Linscott is now officially listed as a co-author.

I don't really know. The SMP change is probably the major change. There could possibly be other smaller changes that they didn't bother to mention.

SMP stands for symmetric multiprocessing, and it's the algorithm for how the engine handles multiple core calculations. I don't know anything about it myself, but here's a couple of links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_multiprocessing

http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Parallel+Search

Not the same - stronger!

This subject deserves a thread of its own:

What's new in Stockfish 7