On-line engine blitz tourney October

[Maarten Claessens]

The monthly online engine blitz tournament for October will take place on:

Saturday, October 12, 2:00 PM EST (Boston time) 20:00 CET (Amsterdam time)

To connect, use the following command:

winboard -zp -ics -icshost nightmare-chess.nl -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz -keepAlive 30
(For UCI engines, add -fUCI)

I wonder how to start your engine with a comment line parameter after the executable name, I could not optimize the number of threads because of that.

A good question, probably you have to add quotes, but I'm not sure, the only one who knows is probably HGM, the maintainer of Winboard.

You indeed need to use quotes. I start WaDuuttie with -fcp "WaDuuttie.exe -x -h 24 -p 20 +p Book.bin +l +L"

[Joost Buijs]

many many thanks for this blitz tournament, i enjoy it very well even i had problem in the first 2 rounds, it was ok.

You're welcome. I will inform you when we hold the next tournament.

I didn't notice anything wrong with Tornado in the first round, the win from Nightmare against Tornado seemed pretty normal to me, Tornado was out-calculated in the late midgame, I saw nothing strange happening during that game.

[Rebel]

The monthly online engine blitz tournament for October will take place on:

Saturday, October 12, 2:00 PM EST (Boston time) 20:00 CET (Amsterdam time)

To connect, use the following command:

winboard -zp -ics -icshost nightmare-chess.nl -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz -keepAlive 30
(For UCI engines, add -fUCI)

I wonder how to start your engine with a comment line parameter after the executable name, I could not optimize the number of threads because of that.

A good question, probably you have to add quotes, but I'm not sure, the only one who knows is probably HGM, the maintainer of Winboard.

You indeed need to use quotes. I start WaDuuttie with -fcp "WaDuuttie.exe -x -h 24 -p 20 +p Book.bin +l +L"

I tried the quotes, but probably your engine is Winboard? Because with UCI the software does not accept it.

[hgm]

You have a UCI engine that needs command-line parameters to set its options? I have never seen that; normally these are controlled through the engine-defined options.

[Rebel]

You have a UCI engine that needs command-line parameters to set its options? I have never seen that; normally these are controlled through the engine-defined options.

Yes.

Other GUI's support it (Arena, CuteChess)

[hgm]

It doesn't really seem UCI compliant, then... In UCI you should be able to alter the number of threads interactively through the GUI's engine-settings dialog.

But of course you should be able to use engines commands containing arguments in WinBoard too. But to be clear, the command you used was:

winboard -zp -ics -icshost nightmare-chess.nl -icshelper timeseal -fcp "rebel.exe arguments" -fd "ENGINEFOLDER" -autoKibitz -keepAlive 30 -fUCI

? I don't see why that would not work. The command shell should have stripped the double quates from the command, but passed their content as a single space-containing string to winboard.exe. XBoard should have double-quoted the engine command again while passing it to the UCI adapter.

[Rebel]

Of course I tried - "rebel.exe poweruser" in my case, but to no avail.

Is there not some sort of -arg poweruser ?

[hgm]

No, there isn't. And it should not be needed, as it does what the quotes have already done successfully for many decades. If anything goes wrong, it is likely in passing the engine command to the UCI adapter.

If things do not work as expected, always look what exactly is going on, in the log. To look what command WinBoard uses to start up that adapter start it with extra argument -debug, and look in the winboard.debug file it then creates. There you will be able to see the exact command WinBoard will try to run as engine.

There are many things that could go wrong there. Windows might not correctly parse the adapter command into executable name and arguments, or the adapter command might not understand the arguments it gets correctly.

[CRoberson]

It doesn't really seem UCI compliant, then... In UCI you should be able to alter the number of threads interactively through the GUI's engine-settings dialog.

A version of Ares uses MPI for distributed computing. I wrote that code over 14 years ago and it worked fine. Still does in GUIs that command line parameters for UCI engines. The reason is to start an MPI based program, I start it with "mpirun ....." so the engine is UCI compliant, but the engine is started via mpirun/mpiexec.