On-line engine tourney March

[hgm]

The on-line engine blitz tourney for March will take place on:

Saturday March 15, 4pm Boston time (21:00 Amsterdam time)

To connect:

winboard -zp -ics -icshost 83.163.204.254 -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz

(for UCI engines, add -fUCI)

Note: DST seems to be in effect in the U.S., but not yet in Europe, so for Americans subject to this the tourney will start 1 hour later than usual!

[nionita]

Hi H.G.,

I got access to a server with 32 cores and wanted to see what such a beast could move. While my engine (Barbarossa) does not yet use parallel search, I was thinking to use Stockfish.

Now first question: does xboard have a version which do no require X to be installed on the machine? I know that it has a no-gui mode of operation, but I guess the installation needs X - which I don't want to setup on that machine.

If this does not work: which software could I use to connect to your tourney - if any?

Second question: is it supposed that somebody plays in this tourney with an engine which he doesn't own? I mean, if I find a method to play with some engines on that machine, I could of course do my own tests, but maybe this could be interesting for other too, how one of best engines could scale on this number of cores .

[hgm]

As long as none of the Stockfish authors wants to enter Stockfish by themselves, you are free to use Stockfish. The tourney is not an authors-only tournament, and non-programmers often participate too.

That being said, using Stockfish on a 32-core machine is a bit like using a cannon to kill a mosquito; the strongest opponent you can expect would probably be Gaviota on 4 cores, and in earlier rounds you would probably play against micro-Max on a single core and Fruit on a smartphone...

XBoard cannot run without an X-server. Perhaps IcsDrone can be used, but I have no experience with that at all.

[AlvaroBegue]

XBoard cannot run without an X-server.

You could set up Xvfb, which looks like an X server to the client but doesn't display any graphics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvfb

Would installing that be acceptable? I am sure it's tiny...

[petero2]

XBoard cannot run without an X-server.

True, but the X server does not have to run on the same machine as the engine. I usually connect using the "-rsh ssh" feature in xboard, like this:

Code: Select all

xboard -ics -icshost 83.163.204.254 -icshelper timeseal -zp -autoKibitz -size huge -fh t620 -fcp 'cd /home/petero/chess/texel/hgmtourney ; polyglot' -rsh ssh -remoteUser petero

t620 is my 16 core computer which is connected to the local network but not to a monitor.

[hgm]

Indeed, that definitely is an alternative. Run XBoard or WinBoard on one machine (connecting from there to the ICS), and run the engine on another.

[nionita]

XBoard cannot run without an X-server.

True, but the X server does not have to run on the same machine as the engine. I usually connect using the "-rsh ssh" feature in xboard, like this:

Code: Select all

xboard -ics -icshost 83.163.204.254 -icshelper timeseal -zp -autoKibitz -size huge -fh t620 -fcp 'cd /home/petero/chess/texel/hgmtourney ; polyglot' -rsh ssh -remoteUser petero

t620 is my 16 core computer which is connected to the local network but not to a monitor.

This looks to be the solution. So if I understand correctly, -fh <hostname> gives the host, and the command from -fcp will be executed over ssh on that host. Then I need only polyglot to be installed there (I guess is just a binary). Is this correct?

I will try to make the setup to run winboard with one remote engine.

[hgm]

Indeed, the -fh (-firstHost) command tells XBoard where to run the first engine, -rsh ssh tells it to use ssh for that. As usual -fcp then specifies the command you want to run via ssh once it is logged in. Apparently Peter lets it change to a directory where he presumably put a polyglot.ini file to specify the engine, and then starts polyglot (which presumably is in /usr/games on the host machine, so in the search path).

An alterative would be to just specify -fcp ENGINE -fUCI or -fcp ./ENGINE -fd ENGINEDIR -fUCI (provided the Polyglot on the host machine isn't a stone-age version).

[nionita]

Ok, wonderful, it works (with my engine first; I have to download Stockfish).

Just for the record:

1. With Windows everything is hard - missing ssh, for example - so I gave up

2. On linux it does not work with -fUCI -fh host -fcp -rsh ssh -fcp ./engine
It connects, but then I get the error message:

"Error: first chess programm (polyglot -noini -ec "cd ..." -ed "." -uci NalimovCache=4) exited unexpectedly"

I had to install polyglot on the server and run just like Peter said. This works fine.

@H.G: Can you please give me 2 new accounts for your server?
- one for the test with Stockfish
- one for my engine Barbarossa (my current account is Abulafia, but I don't develop that program anymore, and it's nicer to see the correct name)

And, of course, this will be just a test, I will not run this one all the time just to win the touney

[hgm]

OK, I created the accounts.

As to the error message: it seems you still had the cd command in the -fcp argument. It should contain just the engine command. If you want to run the engine from another directory you should specify that in an -fd option. But usually engines on Linux know how to find their data files irrespective of what directory you run them from, so an -fd option would not be needed. If the engine binary is not in a standard directory like /usr/games, but in the current directory, you should not forget to prefix it with ./ , as Linux would refuse to execute it otherwise.

If that doesn't work, you have a bad Polyglot.