On-line engine blitz tourney April

[Joost Buijs]

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

Saturday April 10, 2:00 PM EST (Boston time), 20:00 CET (Amsterdam time)

To connect:

winboard -zp -ics -icshost nightmare-chess.nl -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz

(for UCI engines, add -fUCI)

People without account can submit a request for an account to admin@nightmare-chess.nl

As usual our tournament manager will be: Eendje (Lisebeth on ICC)

The format will be 9 rounds Swiss 5/1

[Henk]

By the way is it possible that humans can participate as well ?
I can imagine that some people like to play against some other engines but not take the time to install them on their own computer.
Also any club player has a good chance to win against Skipper.

[Joost Buijs]

By the way is it possible that humans can participate as well ?
I can imagine that some people like to play against some other engines but not take the time to install them on their own computer.
Also any club player has a good chance to win against Skipper.

In principle there is no difference between a computer account and a human account, so yes this is possible. Average club players have Elo ratings of ~1600 or so, my guess is that most humans will lose, even from Skipper.

I don't know how the server ratings compare to human ratings, the ratings on the server are probably too low, contrary to CCRL ratings which are way to high.

[Henk]

Today I saw a video where Botez sisters were playing against Magnus Bot at level 10 years old. Magnus himself was invited as well to give comment on that game. So we might invite Botez sisters and Magnus to participate.

O wait Magnus probably tried to sell his Bot. And Botez sisters want to make chess videos with as many viewers as possible or they were also payed to make advertisement for the Magnus Bot.

[Henk]

This was the video. See chess bots getting more accepted:

[mvanthoor]

Could someone tell me how I set up the engine to use its hash table and an opening book correctly? The engine does not have an "OwnBook" yet, so the GUI has to provide that, and I can't find where to set the hash table size for the engine in such a way that Rustic automatically uses it when starting from the command-line above.

[Ras]

I can't find where to set the hash table size for the engine in such a way that Rustic automatically uses it when starting from the command-line above.

You just configure it in the GUI, both book and hashtables. In case of xboard, it's under Engines -> Common Options. I don't recall how it is in Winboard, but probably similar. Of course, Rustic has to support the relevant command for the hashtable size, but there's no action required for the book on engine side.

[voffka]

I'd like to participate with latest Igel 3.0.0, hopefully it will work this time.

P.S. Anyone knows if it is possible to connect from a Linux machine running no UI?

[Joost Buijs]

Without GUI you can use ICSDrone, there are several people using this. I'm pretty sure Arasan uses this too.

[amanjpro]

Thanks for the tourney.