Arena 1.99beta5

[Tony Thomas]

No offence is intended of course,the Arena tournament option is the best out there beating any other chess GUI....

Having only ever run one tournament in Arena
When you and Tony say it's the best out there for tournaments - can you clarify why this is so, what features and functionality does it offer that other GUIs don't ? Or what specifically does it do better ?

I decided not to buy anymore chessbase products after they removed support for winboard engines. Their winboard support was clumsy to begin with. If a company removes a broken feature instead of trying to fix the problem, they have issues with their work ethics. People with bad work ethics doesnt deserve my money.

[Henrik Dinesen]

I decided not to buy anymore chessbase products after they removed support for winboard engines. Their winboard support was clumsy to begin with. If a company removes a broken feature instead of trying to fix the problem, they have issues with their work ethics. People with bad work ethics doesnt deserve my money.

I don't recall any support for WB engines from CB, except the download of the WB to UCI converter hidden somewhere on the website...
WB engines in CB programs as always been a bit messy IMO. While I personally is in favour of the UCI-protocol, I see things is well managed in other GUI's, so I don't se why CB discards it.

[Tony Thomas]

They used to have a winboard adapter, Fritz 6 was the last version to support it if my memory serves me right.

[genorb]

So it seems that not much people are using Arena to run tournaments...

Anyway, if someone do it can he have a look at the results of the games and especially look for "forfeit on time"? (with Arena 1.99beta5)

For me there is a clear problem with the new release. Another exemple: Over 858 with top commercial programs (Shredder, Naum, Zappa, Rybka etc.), with the previous releases of Arena, no a single loss on time! With Arena 1.99 beta5, there were 12 loss on time after 65 games!

Thanks in advance!

[genorb]

The time control I used was 40 moves in 5 minutes with repetition, and a lot of the loss on time were precisely at the 40th move (or an integer multiple). But they were loss on time for the other moves as well.

[Alexander Schmidt]

Based on past experience with Arena, i venture a guess - re-installing all the engines?

There was somewhere a change in the handling of engine data, but if you had all versions and installed it as described, Arena imported the old data.

I never had to reinstall anything from the first Arena If I remember right.

Best,
Alex

[Alexander Schmidt]

The only thing I noticed that Arena sometimes puts a {white forfeits on time} tag even after a game finished as draw. However, the reported result is correct.

Well, it`s a betatest. The right place to report such things is the Arena forum

Best,
Alex

[gerold]

Dear all,

I am doing tests of engines on my website (http://www.ordichec.net) and I use Arena.

I have remarked that with Arena 1.99beta5 (the last release) there are a lot of forfeit on time... Especially for Shredder 11 et Naum 3.0. It almost never happens with the previous version of Arena (and when it happens it was essentially due to a bug in the engine, on my system Ktulu 4.2 and Pseudo 0.7c do it sometime). Let's say that it happens 20 times over 10000 games (0.2%).

I am now running a tournament and after 65 games I have 12 games where there is a forfeit on time (18.5%). I think this not normal and I think this is due to Arena. So I am back to the beta4.

Someone can confirm that there is a problem with forfeit on time with the new release of Arena?

I add that to install Arena 1.99beta5 I just replaced the .exe (Arena.exe) by the new one. It seems that everything works fine (and at first sight sightly better than with beta4) except those forfeit on time...

Thanks for helping me!

Best to use Arena 1.1 untill the beta's work better. Time and
so forth.

[Spock]

Can I ask an Arena question for the experts here ?

In Chessbase and Shredder GUIs you can run an engine match between 2 engines, say 30 games, and choose "switch sides" or "alternate colours" to have the engines play the same opening with white and black (i.e. 15 openings x 2). This is how I prefer to run my CCRL matches

Is this possible with Arena ? I see in Arena you need tournament mode with the 2 engines, but I don't see the switch sides option. Is this possible ?

thanks

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Can I ask an Arena question for the experts here ?

In Chessbase and Shredder GUIs you can run an engine match between 2 engines, say 30 games, and choose "switch sides" or "alternate colours" to have the engines play the same opening with white and black (i.e. 15 openings x 2). This is how I prefer to run my CCRL matches

Is this possible with Arena ? I see in Arena you need tournament mode with the 2 engines, but I don't see the switch sides option. Is this possible ?

thanks

AFAIK,it's not possible Ray....