Windows tool to run engine matches

[hgm]

What are you trying to do here? Continue an existing tourney, or copy the contents of an existing tourney as a template for starting a new (but similar) tournament?

For the latter you would have to press 'Clone Tourney'. This will read the tourney file of the given name, and copy all the parameter values to the corresponding entry fields of the dialog (including Particpants etc.). Then you can change what you want to change (possibly nothing), and press OK to start the new tourney. When you pressed 'Clone Tourney' the name of the tourney file you were copying will automatically be replaced by a proposed name for a new tourney. And when the name of a non-existent file is in the Tourney File field, a file of that name will be created, and all the settings specified in the dialog will be written to it.

When the mentioned tourney file was one of a tournament that is not yet finished, and you wanted to continue that, you can press OK immediately. This will read the tourney file (overruling whatever was written in the dialog field), and start playing according to the instructions it contains. An easier way to do that is ust double-click the tourney file from the Windows explorer.This would strart up WinBoard on the tourney file.

As to the time control: if you want fractional minutes, the format is min:sec. So in stead of 0.1 you should enter 0:06. (All thanks to the Babylonians, I suppose...)

[phenri]

The ultimate goal is definitely to start a tournament, but for the moment I am at the stage of editing the file trn

If I double-click the file, it opens with an older version of Winboard.

And all it makes me crazy.

[hgm]

The ultimate goal is definitely to start a tournament, but for the moment I am at the stage of editing the file trn

If I double-click the file, it opens with an older version of Winboard.

Ah, that definitely is very bad. It means something must be wrong in window's file associations, that it cannot handle it when there are two executables of the same name.

I am not enough of a windows expert to know how to solve that. I suppose un-installing the old WinBoard version, (but be careful not to force deletion of the entire tree if you created files there that you want tokeep!), or renaming its winboard.exe into something else, and then perhaps run the installer of the new one again. I don't know if there is any special reason you wanted to keep the old version.

Perhaps it is a bad idea that the installer proposes a new name for the install folder for every version (like C:\WinBoard-4.7.3). It might be better to always have it propose C:\WinBoard, so that new installs by default would overwrite older installs.

If the association cannot be fixed, the best way to resume a tournament would be:

1) Start WinBoard
2) Open the Tournament dialog
3) Browse to the desired Tournament file, to get its name in the Tourney File text entry
4) Press OK

This should restart the tournament (orstart another worker on an already running tournament). I agree this is not nearly as convenient a double-clicking the tourney file.

And to enter fractional increment you should indeed type 0.1 for 1/10 of a second. (There are no units like 'hexiseconds' or 'ticks' for specifying 1/60 of a second in common use. Times conventionally are written as hours:min:sec, but there is no special unit below the second, so the remaining fractions of a second are written as normal decimal fractions. Fractions of hours are written as minutes, however, and fractions of minutes as seconds. I am sorry if this is confusing, but it is a notation system that is in common use.)

Beware that the ability to accept fractional seconds in the TC dialog is a quite recent addition to WinBoard. Version 4.7.3 should certainly support it, though.

[phenri]

The problem is you can not open, edit and view a trn file from Winboard with updated settings values from the trn file. And is easy to lose the thread, you do not know what it has and what it lacks. We must constantly repeat the process.

But thank you

ps: The correct time control format that work for 10 secondes + 0.05 secondes is:

Code: Select all

-tc 0:10
-inc 0.05

[hgm]

The problem is you can not open, edit and view a trn file from Winboard with updated settings values from the trn file.

It is not easy because you are not supposed to do that. Editing the tourney file would most likely wreck things. When you would alter the tournament file of a tournament in progress (e.g. by adding an extra participant) you would totally wreck the tournament. Once you created the tournament file, its contents should not be changed, other than by WinBoard adding the results to the -result list, to keep track of which games have been played. Other changes would destroy the integrity of the tournament.

To examine the contents of an existing tournament file you can browse to it from the Tournament dialog and press 'Clone Tourney'. That shows you all the settings that were in it (except the results). You cannot change and write it back to the same file, however. You can change it and save to a file with another name, (by pressing OK), which would then be an identical copy of the original tourney. (You could of course also have done that by simply copy-pasting the tourney file to another name in Windows, so usually you would use the Clone Tourney method to make a nearly-identical copy, changing some of the settings, before saving it. E.g. if the tourney was a test gauntlet, you would typically want to change the name of the first participant (the gauntlet engine) to that of the new version/engine you want to test.)

And is easy to lose the thread, you do not know what it has and what it lacks. We must constantly repeat the process.

I am not sure what exactly you mean here. If the problem is that you cannot remember what kind of tourney was defined in a tourney file of a given name, you should pick names that are more descriptive. You are not obliged to accept the name proposed by WinBoard (which is not an immutable thing, but can be set through the persistent option -defaultTourneyName, which is configured to "Tourney_%y%M%d_%h%m.trn" and could be easily set to anything else). You could edit it before pressing OK.

[phenri]

Thank you for clarification,
However, I maintain that it would make more sense to get the data refreshed at the time of opening the file, then choose to restart or continue the tournament. Because it seemed that the "trn" file was a file containing only the parameters of the tournament and not the combination of parameters and the report of the tournament. But now that I know that I can do with it. Thanks

[Steve Maughan]

Hi Sergei,

Take a look at this blog post - it may be of help,

http://www.chessprogramming.net/compute ... framework/

Steve

P.S. On Windows I've found CuteChess-CLI version 0.51 more stable than the most recent 0.6