CPT Community

Hi Stefan, hope all is well with you. I am currently in the evaluation period of CPT 4.0, considering upgrading from version 3.3 which I have been using until now. I have some questions, and would really appreciate your feedback on them.


 

1. If I select Main menu -> Settings, the only thing I see is the option form which asks for the location of a back up folder - is this the only setting available?
2. From the "Repertoire" view, I don't understand how to navigate a line. Let's say I have a specific line selected and visualised, up to move 10; if I go back to move 3, all the moves from 4 to 10 will "disappear", hence I won't be able to navigate that line (unless I remember the line and I therefore select at each variation the correct branch)
3. Is it possible (as it was in 3.3) to analyze any given position with a chess engine?
4. Is it possible to export as pgn the specific line that I am visualising at any given moment (and not the full repertoire)? For example, to import it into another chess program and analyse it
5. In  "recall" mode, it looks like it is not possible to recall whole lines, but only position by position, is this correct or am I missing something?

 

 Thanks in advance,




Andrea

Hi Andrea,

I'm happy to answer your questions:

1) at the moment yes, that's all, but more will be probably added over time. However, although it looks pretty empty this is mainly because of the new ribbon control and some other changes which reduced the need of an explicite settings page (e.g. now you can change the chessboard colors directly without having to open the settings and close it). CPT 4 let you adjust the program as CPT 3.3 did.

2)  There are two alternatives: if you activate the position explorer you might be able to keep the line in view. Another option is to use the bookmark function by creating a variation (just add a variation at the current position and you can easily jump back to it). Though, if it is intended for a rather on the fly task the variation approach is not really very handy. I personally use a lot the key board arrows (and if you press the shift-key down you will jump forward and backward to the next branch). However, you still would need to remember the line. Maybe you could explain a little bit more in which scenario you would like to see such a function? If you have any suggestions how it could work (from a users point of view), please let me know!

3) Not at the moment. It will be added with a later version (at no extra cost). It will support UCI then too.

4) That's not possible at the moment. You can only copy the current position to analyze it in another program. I have put it on the feature request list.

5) At the moment the recall mode doesn't support complete lines. There are good chances that I will add such an option in the future as more users have requested it. Although I believe the most efficient way is to show only the position to recall. I'm training my complete repertoire this way for some time now. In the beginning I had to get used to it, but now I'm completely convinced.

Thanks,

Stefan 

Many thanks for the prompt answer, Stefan.

StefanRenzewitz:

1) at the moment yes, that's all, but more will be probably added over time. However, although it looks pretty empty this is mainly because of the new ribbon control and some other changes which reduced the need of an explicite settings page (e.g. now you can change the chessboard colors directly without having to open the settings and close it). CPT 4 let you adjust the program as CPT 3.3 did.
 

OK, no big deal, I just wanted to make sure I was not missing anything. For example, I can’t find anymore useful parameters we had in 3.3 such as how many times a line should be done correctly before the program consider it learnt

StefanRenzewitz:

2)  There are two alternatives: if you activate the position explorer you might be able to keep the line in view. Another option is to use the bookmark function by creating a variation (just add a variation at the current position and you can easily jump back to it). Though, if it is intended for a rather on the fly task the variation approach is not really very handy. I personally use a lot the key board arrows (and if you press the shift-key down you will jump forward and backward to the next branch). However, you still would need to remember the line. Maybe you could explain a little bit more in which scenario you would like to see such a function? If you have any suggestions how it could work (from a users point of view), please let me know!

Here is an example: I am recalling an opening, and I get to a position which for the life of me I can’t remember. I then mark the position and, when back in the explorer, I go to that position. I see that it is a position resulting from a particular sequence of 12 moves, and I see (of course) the 12 moves and the resulting position. Now, if I want to “see” the whole sequence of moves on the board, I have no way to do it, unless I use another board/program. What I mean is that I cannot “navigate” that particular line (to explore it and see all the associated comments) unless I can remember the full sequence. This looks like a significant limitation to me, unless I am missing the obvious!

StefanRenzewitz:

3) Not at the moment. It will be added with a later version (at no extra cost). It will support UCI then too.
 

OK, no big deal again. It just looked weird to me, because that’s an option we had in 3.3, so I was not expecting to lose functionality when going from 3 to 4!

StefanRenzewitz:

4) That's not possible at the moment. You can only copy the current position to analyze it in another program. I have put it on the feature request list.

Not a big problem, I didn’t see until now the “Copy position to clipboard” button, so that’s good enough to analyse a final position. However, it would be great having the possibility to export the full line, because it would be at least a workaround to point (2) above

StefanRenzewitz:

5) At the moment the recall mode doesn't support complete lines. There are good chances that I will add such an option in the future as more users have requested it. Although I believe the most efficient way is to show only the position to recall. I'm training my complete repertoire this way for some time now. In the beginning I had to get used to it, but now I'm completely convinced.

Yep, I understand your point. I am still a bit uncomfortable, though, being unable to play through a full line end to end if I wish to do so, because the tool has decided I have learnt that line! I think having the option to choose would be great – then you can balance efficiency (going in position mode) with control / tournament preparation (going in line mode – in the end, when you play a game, you do it in end to end mode!)

Thanks again,

Andrea

Hi Andrea,

thanks for further information about your move sequence scenario. I don't have yet an idea how to provide an intuitive way to support you in such a scenario, but I keep it on the list.

Regarding missing CPT 3 features. I removed some which I considered less popular in order to make the UI less crowded and scary for new users. The particular one which you mention ( how many times a line should be done correctly before the program consider it learnt) might be re-implemented.

The engine support program code changed in order to support UCI engines too. Unfortunately it didn't make it into final release which eventually lead to the situation that even xboard support is not available at the moment, but both will be available in the future.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Kind regards,

Stefan 

 

Thanks again, Stefan.

Regarding the sequence scenario, I think the easiest thing would be if you could add an "export line" button, similar to the "export position" button: in this case, it would be sufficient to import the line into my other chess app, and that would do the trick!

Regarding engine support, not a big deal to me - now that I know how to export a position, I can do it pretty quickly - of course it would be handy to have the engine integrated, but that's not a huge problem!

I have one last question: regarding the possibility to recall full lines, the workaround  I am using is the following: I create a copy of my repertoire, open the copy, reset the training score and do the training - this achieves what I want, with the only pity that, of course, the resulting training results cannot be imported back into the actual repertoire. My question is the following: If I have a repertoire "REP", and  I copy it into "REP_mycopy", when I open it in the application window I still see "REP" - how can I change this? The reason why I am asking is that, given I switch back and forth and I reset scores on the copy, I don't want to mess up and reset the score on the actual main repertoire by mistake, or update my copy repertoire with new variation rather than the main one (which could easily happen, considering I see the wrong name in the window...).

Thanks again,

Andrea