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Hot Topic (More than 10 Replies) Chess Position Trainer (Read 21113 times)
doefmat
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #22 - 04/11/21 at 04:37:00
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Does anyone know what the bus factor of Chess Position Trainer team is?
  

Chesspub; where people devote their whole life to find novelties on move 26 just to blunder on move 27
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Jonathan003
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #21 - 04/09/21 at 19:11:16
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Douse anyone know how I can mark all candidate moves as 'best moves' in CPT?
I mean in one go, without having to check the boxes manually.
  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #20 - 05/18/18 at 05:08:13
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Hi Katalyst,

your assumption is correct. I've added the re-order function when I realized some professional eBooks offer alternative candidate moves for your side just to show why the other move is bad. Sometimes this is the first candidate move, which they cover and then it would be automatically your main move unless you change the order. Fortunately they use move assessments like ?! in this case. The program let you take advantage of this and auto-re-order the moves.

If you enter the moves manually or your source looks different it is not likely you need the function.

Your other question demonstrates the power of the position database. First of all, if you import that same position twice it is not impored the second time. You can't create double positions in CPT.

Four your scenario there is a good trick to keep the training stats and still ensure your repertoire only covers the moves you really want to have. I suggest to create a new opening called "your opening name updated". Then you import the PGN into this opening. What happens? The programm will not import existing positions, but instead reference to it in the "your opening name updated". That means it also keeps the training statistics, comments etc. However, if a move is no longer of your PGN repertoire it will be not imported and thus being part of your new opening in CPT. After the import you can safely delete the old opening and rename the updated one to the old one.

Please let me know if the explanation is clear or if you have further questions.

Thanks,
Stefan
  

Author of Chess Position Trainer
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #19 - 05/04/18 at 15:36:39
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Hello, Stefan, not sure you are still checking this thread but I just started using this software and came across the same message.

If I understand it correctly, by default the main line from your imported pgn is the main line in CPT (obviously I suppose).

It's only when if the main line is marked with, eg. ?! or ? and there is a subvariation that is marked 'better', then choosing the reordering option would promote the 'better' subvariation to the main line.

So if you are happy with your main line in the pgn being the  main line of your repertoire there should be no need to reorder, is that correct?

I was also wondering what happens when you update your repertoire.  The easy thing to do would be to delete the repertoire and reimport the new updated pgn into a new repertoire, but that would reset all of the training stats etc.

So I wondered what would happen if you just imported the updated pgn to the existing repertoire? Would you end up with tons of duplicate moves, or is the program able to merge them together? 

Thank you
  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #18 - 10/28/17 at 05:56:54
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I'm the author of Chess Position Trainer and found this thread just by chance as I was looking for some comments on Mihail Marin's new book “The Pirc Defence”.

Great to see my software discussed! First of all, I'm not a native speaker, but the confusion was created by a misleading statement regardless of the language. Instead of:
"You've just imported a PGN file. The imported moves are not in the correct order in the source."
it should say:
"You've just imported a PGN file. The imported candidate moves for your side might not be in the correct order in the source (e.g. a weaker move is shown first and the best move only as an alternative). In this case you can let CPT automatically re-order..."

I've just updated the text accordingly in the program for future releases.

I wan to note it is not a message dialog box. It is rather a flyout panel and you can click anywhere and it disappears. Actually, this function was added later as a "Tip" after an import has been completed. Giving some background: I personally purchased quite a few eBooks in PGN format in the past. After the import I realized that sometimes the author offers more than one candidate move for my side. However, not always was the author starting with the best move for my side, but with the move he is not recommending. In this case he usually uses the move evaluation "?" or "?!". If you start training your opening without making some adjustments you will train an inferior / bad move. Now, I thought it would be pretty helpful to automatically order the candidates based on these evaluations and thus saving a lot of time after the import. I do this after the import, because it can be that some candidate moves already exist for a position prior to the import. This gives more flexibility.

How can you find positions with more than one candidate move for your side? Of course there is a function, because I needed it myself too (sometimes I have to take advantage of the fact that I'm the developer of the software myself)  Cheesy In the ribbon section "Navigation" there is a dropdown above two double blue arrows. The default selection is "Branch" and it let you navigate to the next / previous branch, which is the most common use case. However, you can also choose ">1 candidate move". If you select this entry and use the double blue arrows you will jump to the next position where more than one candidate move exists for your side. It is not only a big time saver for this use case, but also ensures you don't miss any such position, which is very difficult otherwise to detect.

I hope this clarifies a little bit the confusion.

Thanks,
Stefan
  

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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #17 - 10/26/17 at 17:32:36
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ahu_lee wrote on 10/25/17 at 22:35:30:
an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 10/25/17 at 21:21:43:
A way to test my theory would be to import a very small PGN with guaranteed unique candidates


Thank you, an ordinary chessplayer, but I had already tried that and I still got that alert message. That's exactly the reason I posted my question here.
Did you try the second half of my suggestion?
  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #16 - 10/26/17 at 12:16:14
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ReneDescartes wrote on 10/25/17 at 23:48:03:
Yes, that's what I think is going on. Only I think he's a very good and devoted programmer, and I love his product and use it in preference to COW, which I used to use. But these things can spook users, and programmers are not always the best designers of every aspect of software interfaces--for example, wording of messages. A friendly "Would you like to optimize the order of any move choices" might have avoided this issue.


I absolutely agree. The program is great and so is the author, there's no question about it. I mean, I was just trying to be funny with that remark. It wasn't meant to offend anybody. And yes, I, probably, one of those who get spooked by such things. Thanks so much, ReneDescartes, for your answers and explanation. Cheers.
  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #15 - 10/26/17 at 07:53:23
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I don't know if it is a coincidence or not but I translated yesterday my review about the Chess Position Trainer to English on my blog: http://chess-brabo.blogspot.com/2017/10/chess-position-trainer.html
Today I just see this thread popping up.
  
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ReneDescartes
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #14 - 10/25/17 at 23:48:03
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Yes, that's what I think is going on. Only I think he's a very good and devoted programmer, and I love his product and use it in preference to COW, which I used to use. But these things can spook users, and programmers are not always the best designers of every aspect of software interfaces--for example, wording of messages. A friendly "Would you like to optimize the order of any move choices" might have avoided this issue.
« Last Edit: 10/26/17 at 02:05:53 by ReneDescartes »  
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ahu_lee
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #13 - 10/25/17 at 22:35:30
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an ordinary chessplayer wrote on 10/25/17 at 21:21:43:
A way to test my theory would be to import a very small PGN with guaranteed unique candidates


Thank you, an ordinary chessplayer, but I had already tried that and I still got that alert message. That's exactly the reason I posted my question here.
  
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ahu_lee
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #12 - 10/25/17 at 22:30:53
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Thank you for your reply, ReneDescartes. So, basically, what you're saying is, no matter whether a PGN file has anything to re-order or not you always get that pop-up notification after importing it in CPT because the programmer (author of CPT) decided it was not worth to write any additional if/else statements etc, create additional processes that would analyze the file while it is being imported, but instead after the file is imported simply notify the user with the alert message saying there's something wrong with the move order in your source file? Smiley I think, I already love that programmer.
  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #11 - 10/25/17 at 21:21:43
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I don't have the software. But error messages in all kinds of software are notorious for being misleading. I looked at the manual (CPT5_Manual.pdf), searched for "Candidate Moves Ranking", and found zero matches. But it is in there! In section 5.11.2 "Re-ordering of Candidate Moves" there is a tiny screenshot with the words "Candidate Moves Ranking"! It seems this function needs to have an "evaluation" attached to the move in order to succeed. (And "!?" counts as an "evaluation"? Not sure if I am interpreting that correctly.)

My guess is that your PGN does not have any evaluations next to the (unique) moves, so the import complains that they "are not in the correct order". True enough, because they are not in ANY order. In an ideal world CPT would only emit that warning if the moves were both unevaluated and non-unique. A way to test my theory would be to import a very small PGN with guaranteed unique candidates, and see if you get the message. Then add an evaluation to EVERY ply, import again, and see what happens.

To answer your second question, I believe you cannot "find" all the positions with more than one candidate in CPT, except by trial-and-error. You do the work in the source PGN, and let the "Candidate Moves Ranking" order them automatically.

Edited:
ReneDescartes was a little quicker to answer. His reply is perfectly valid.
  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #10 - 10/25/17 at 20:50:57
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I think this reordering business is just a harmless example of a typical computer programmer's thought process. The imported database has not been optimized by definition, because that operation was never performed. If you did perform it, nothing would change, but the program cannot know that without special code to investigate the question (e.g. whether there are branches, etc.), and that code is not deemed worth writing. If you allow it to "reorder" and there's nothing to reorder, it shouldn't do anything.

Backsolving is using preexisting or fresh evaluations far down in the variation tree, say for all positions recorded at move 17,  to create an evaluation farther up the tree, for example for a move-13 choice leading to all these positions. The computer can do this easily by doing what a good human calculator does, namely choosing the best worst-case at each move ("My opponent will do his worst after my move, so the best case of this worst is my best move").

If in backsolving the computer evaluates each position on the fly with an engine, then the heavy and unwieldy computation load (e.g. many processes) could make it easier to crash the computer.
  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #9 - 10/25/17 at 17:27:48
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This is an old thread, but it is the only one I could find searching for "chess position trainer". I'm just starting to use it and I have some very basic questions. So, I thought maybe instead of creating a new topic, it may have been better to ask them in an existing one.


Everytime I import a PGN with my repertoire in CPT I get the pop-up notification saying:

The imported moves are not in the correct order in the source. You can let CPT automatically re-order all candidate moves. Please use the function 'Candidate Moves Ranking'.

And the manual explains (I'll rephrase it a bit):
This(Candidate Moves Ranking) is a very powerful feature that allows you to re-order candidate moves based on move evaluation after importing a PGN file where the author includes for some positions more than one candidate move for your side.

But in my case PGN files I imported had only one move per position for my side. Why did I see this notification then?

Second, If it's true and the PGN I imported indeed had some alternative lines for my side, how can I manually choose which one I would like to keep and which to delete (that is, how do I find all the positions that has more than one candidate move for my side)?
Because usually when I have alternatives in my repertoire for my side, they are all perfectly sound and I don't want an engine to choose for me which variation I would like to keep/study.
« Last Edit: 10/25/17 at 18:38:54 by ahu_lee »  
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Re: Chess Position Trainer
Reply #8 - 01/07/05 at 17:31:11
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I have experienced the crashes. I e-mailed the author and it is a known bug with the sound features. I turned off sound and the crashes went away.

I also have no idea what backsolving is. Why don't you try posting an error report on the author's bug-fix message board. He is very good about answering and making timely fixes, especially considering he does it for free.

As for the slow move speed, I have noticed it but it is not that bad that it drives me nuts. The reason it is slower is because each time you enter a move, it is saved to the hard drive, which has plusses and minuses. Plus is that it is impossible to lose anything you have entered, even if the program does crash. Minus is a bit slower.

In general I have been happy with the program. The author has been very good about fixing reported bugs, and providing beta releases so users can check that things are fixed.

Kevin
  
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