Chess tournament software

[garybelton]

Does anyone know of a GUI that will allow multiple engines to play at once (like in an online mamer tournament)?

So I have a quad core machine running four different single core engines, eg. engA, engB, engC, engD .

Round 1, engA plays engB and at the same time engC plays engD
Round 2, engA plays engC and at the same time engB plays engD

Currently I see guis that allows engA to play engB but engC and engD sit idle until the match between engA and engB finishes. Maybe a hangover from single core days.

[brianr]

As an option, many GUIs can run multiple copies at the same time relatively cleanly.
Arena is one for sure; just create 4 separate tournaments with different names and use different segments of the starting positions set. For example, on my quad I typically run with 100 positions which are split into four groups of 25 each. Just use the duplicate tournament command and set the starting positions file in the options. I also use Hyatt's 4,000 positions in groups of 1,000 for longer runs.

The results can be easily combined with SCID and then the whole big pgn file processed by Elostat or Bayeslo (I wish there was a GUI for Bayselo like the way Arena can invoke Elostat with point 'n click file/folder access).

When really loading things up, be careful to turn off engine logging and Arena debugging, and I minimize the info kept in the pgn files too. I also stop as many background applications as I can, and even temporarily disable networking. Although not ideal, it certainly does work.

Some managers can run without having to bother with GUI updates, which is even better. Even better, some managers can also run multiple games at the same time, but I'll defer to others to highlight some workable options (Cutechess cli, for one, IIRC)

[garybelton]

Yes thanks for responding, I'm currently doing things with multiple cutechess-cli's and combining the results, but there is a bit of manual overhead involved, it would be great if a gui had this simple function.

[garybelton]

From the cutechess-cli readme

*cutechess-cli* -fcp ['ENGINE OPTIONS'] -scp ['ENGINE OPTIONS'] ['OPTIONS']

I guess ideally I am looking for:

*cutechess-cli* -1cp ['ENGINE OPTIONS'] -2cp ['ENGINE OPTIONS'] -3cp ['ENGINE OPTIONS'] -4cp ['ENGINE OPTIONS'] ['OPTIONS']

and let it do it's thing (would be good if it set cpu affinities too to save the user doing it).

[Richard Allbert]

You can set "concurrency" in curtechess to be able ti run multiple games at once, without running seperate instances of the GUI/Tournament tool.

I was also doing what you were doing... Four folders of the same thing, apart from the starting positions.

If you want a GUI, I think you'll need four instances - I find Winboard works best here - it seems to run the smoothest.

Regards

Richard

[garybelton]

Thanks Richard, ideally what I am looking for I posted below. As I understand things I believe that concurrency just clones fcp and scp, but doesn't add in 3cp and 4cp (please see my post below) - I could be wrong.

[Richard Allbert]

I think we posted at almost the same time.. I don't think Cutechess does what you need.



It'll be intersting to see if anyone replies with a possibility.

Richard

[hgm]

You could run mamer and an ICS, and log all engines onto it, all on the same machine, using -icshost localhost.

[garybelton]

Yes I heard about this, does the ICS run on Windows? Unfortunately I am a Windows luddite and am just looking for a lightweight Windows solution rather than getting into my own ICS (It's heresy I know but I'm not so comfortable with Linux and prefer Windows).

[CRoberson]

You could run mamer and an ICS, and log all engines onto it, all on the same machine, using -icshost localhost.

What an overly simplistic and excellent idea. Can't believe I didn't think about it.