Updating engines mid-tournament

[Jesse Gersenson]

For engine-engine tournaments, common practice is use one version of each engine for the duration of the event. Mid-event upgrades are not allowed.

1. what's the reason for this?
2. are there exceptions?

[Guenther]

For engine-engine tournaments, common practice is use one version of each engine for the duration of the event. Mid-event upgrades are not allowed.

1. what's the reason for this?
2. are there exceptions?

1.

• it requires extra work (and wasn't easy in the past) and requires intervention in a normally automated process

• it could be abused by triggerhappy developers (you won't be happy, if one is updating each round I guess?)

• if the goal was some rating calculation too, it diminishes the number of games per entity

• you need extra rules

2.

• A lot of tournaments in the past allowed 'updates' under certain circumstances (more or less as bugfix), or to a certain
  early fixed point in the tournament

[Ras]

1. In addition to Guenther's points, it rewards proper testing of the software, which is also part of the quality.

[JVMerlino]

Agreed on all points. On the other side, you would have (for example) Olivier Deville's excellent ChessWar and OpenWar tournaments, in which each round took 1-3 days. If you saw your engine do something stupid, or were working on something that you weren't QUITE finished with, you knew you could get a new version in as soon as it was ready. Olivier was very accommodating.

Sadly, Olivier stopped running these tournaments in 2012. I met many people at those tournaments that I still chat with.

[hgm]

It is ideed a pitty that ChessWar was discontinued. It was the best Chess engine competition I have ever seen.

[Graham Banks]

For engine-engine tournaments, common practice is use one version of each engine for the duration of the event. Mid-event upgrades are not allowed.

1. what's the reason for this?
2. are there exceptions?

I allow updated versions to replace existing ones during my tournaments, as long as it's not past a certain point in the tournament.
Easy enough to do under ChessGUI.

[Sergio Martinez]

It is ideed a pitty that ChessWar was discontinued. It was the best Chess engine competition I have ever seen.

I agree with that but adding the Leo tournaments. Two different systems but for me they were the most interesting tournaments I've seen.

On the other hand, the CCT tournaments also seemed very interesting.

[JVMerlino]

Ah, yes, Leo Dijksman as well!

So happy that the CCRL is still going strong and also doing fun tournaments.