running tournaments under linux

[mridul]

The problem I have is that there is no form of X or upper layers (qt/gtk) available on those machines - the dependencies to build even the bare bone versions is too much of a pain (and I mean a few weeks work at minimum).

Copying libQtCore, etc does not work (not for lack of trying mind you !) unfortunately.



Thanks,
Mridul

PS: I meant, pondering is always disabled by default, not enabled by default. there is a 'easy' hardcoded into the code. So the simulations are not representative of actual games.
Just a minor nit, since this is easily rectified : but the dependency on qt kind of mucks it up for me ...

[Daniel Shawul]

The qt libraries should be put under a "lib" folder. I think you can just download them, no need to compile. It also didn't work for me at first and I thought I needed to compile it or somethng. But Illari gave me the following
qt libs to put under the lib folder and it worked. There was no qt version installed on my system as well.

Code: Select all

libchess.so    libchess.so.1.0    libQtCore.so    libQtCore.so.4.5
libchess.so.1  libchess.so.1.0.0  libQtCore.so.4  libQtCore.so.4.5.2

good luck
Daniel

[mridul]

Tried that, does not work (arch issues - it is a weird private handbuilt distro).

I plan to rip qt dependency out of the codebase (if I do get to it) : it is mostly irrelevant to the cli anyway - that is much more easier than trying to get qt support for the entire cluster :)


Thanks for the suggestions.
Regards,
Mridul

[ilari]

Noticed this thread just now. I'm afraid that ripping Qt dependency out of the codebase of cutechess-cli (and cutechess-lib) would be an enourmous task, you'd almost have to rewrite the whole program. We're using Qt for everything - string handling, file handling, inter-process communication, multi-threading, etc.

Like Daniel said, you don't need to have any parts of Qt installed on your system if you have the QtCore library in the cutechess-cli/lib/ folder. Unfortunately I didn't previously package it with cutechess-cli, and the binaries were compiled against Qt 4.7 which is not binary-compatible with Qt 4.6 (the minimum requirement to build cutechess-cli). To fix the problem I've now added the correct QtCore library to the Linux binary packages:
32-bit: http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/bin/cute ... x32.tar.gz
64-bit: http://koti.mbnet.fi/~ilaripih/bin/cute ... x64.tar.gz

If you download and extract one of the above tarballs, you should be able to run cutechess-cli.sh just fine.

[stevenaaus]

The second link you provided ( http://scidvspc.sourceforge.net/ ) does point to a version of scid which can run tourny's : but requires tcl/tk (and so X).

I don't know if this is useful.
Using Scid vs. PC on any computer with Tcl/Tk (and a GUI of course), the chess engines can be hosted on other machines using
this idea with netcat. It's a little technical, and haven't tried it myself, but i think it should work.

[Michel]

You can also put chess engines under xinetd as my son pointed out to me.

[Don]

Hi,


Just curious, how do tournaments get run under linux ?
In particular, where there is no X server running (so no xboard possible).


Looking to run gauntlet and round robin to test a few things ....


Thanks,
Mridul

I wrote a tester in java that I am going to release soon. It is very simple to configure to run as many programs as you want, utilizing as many cores as you want on the same machine. Each match is run in a separate thread. With 3 ply searches I can run 20 or 30 games per second on a 6 core i7. So you don't have to worry about undue overhead. You cannot do that in any graphical tester. The output is a PGN file.

Linux is much better for really fast testing - the same exact tester can only manage a few games per second in windows - not sure why. I think linux threads are lighter or perhaps process startup is faster.