On-line engine blitz tourney June

[hgm]

Hi hgm!
I sent you a pm for Jars and Isa engines
Bests
Dany

Done. (Jars already existed.)

[Robert Pope]

I managed to log in as a guest and played a game against POS, and I just received my login account (Abbess). Do we need to register for the event, or is being connected at start time sufficient?

[hgm]

At the start of the event you have to join it by issuing the command "mam join 1". After that, most of it should proceed automatically. But you have to keep an eye on it, as sometimes disconnections occur, and games do not automatically resume after you reconnect, but will have to be restarted by hand. Which will not happen when both participants leave their machines unattended.

[cetormenter]

I am having a hard time setting the hash table for Nirvana to anything besides 8 MB unless I use a very contrived work around, which seems like it is unintended behavior. I am setting the Hash via the Options -> Common Engine menu. Setting the Hash to a value less than the maximum value that Winboard receives when it sends "uci" to Nirvana, Winboard will set the Hash to 8 MB. However if I instead set the Hash to a value greater than this maximum value then Winboard will set the Hash to the maximum value.

Is there somewhere else I am supposed to set the hash? I am using the command "winboard -zp -ics -icshost winboard.nl -icshelper timeseal -fcp Nirvanachess.exe -fd .\Nirvana -autoKibitz -fUCI" to run Nirvana.

[Modern Times]

Nirvana was using the correct hash for me when I tried it on HG's ICS, but I had some time losses and crashes, so I guess that is worse ! I'll get the config off my other machine and post it here.

[Modern Times]

My startup was:

winboard -ics -icshost winboard.nl -icshelper timeseal -zp -fcp "Nirvanachess 2.1c (popcount).exe" -fd 'C:\WinBoard\Nirvana' -fUCI -autoKibitz -xreuse -keepAlive 5

Polyglot file was:

[PolyGlot]
EngineCommand=Nirvanachess 2.1c (popcount).exe
EngineDir=C:\WinBoard\Nirvana
[Engine]
Hash=1024
Threads=4
Ponder=true


And in Winboard, Options-Common Engine was 1024 with EGTB size zero, becuase Nirvana doesn't support them anyway. I guess that could be left at 32 or something.

[hgm]

I am setting the Hash via the Options -> Common Engine menu. Setting the Hash to a value less than the maximum value that Winboard receives when it sends "uci" to Nirvana, Winboard will set the Hash to 8 MB. However if I instead set the Hash to a value greater than this maximum value then Winboard will set the Hash to the maximum value.

Setting the hash size through Common Engine is indeed the recommended method. Enforcement of the engine-reported min/max values is done by Polyglot, as in WB protocol the 'memory' command just specifies the maximum the engine is allowed to use.

For Fruit this works fine, however. Although it seems to require restarting the engine to effectuate a new hash setting. (But this might be a Fruit peculiarity.) I can see in the Resource Manager that the hash size is what I asked for, (I suppose this is how you check it too), rounded down to a power of 2. If I ask less than the minimum, or more than the maximum, it just uses the min and max.

So I have no idea why it would not work for you. Which Polyglot version are you using?

[cetormenter]

Well I figured it out. I had to set the value in the Polyglot ini file to the same value as what I have in the common engine setting and it works. If they are different from one another then it seems to default to 8MB I am not sure why.

I am using the Ployglot the comes bundled with Winboard 4.8.0, which I believe is 2.0.2.

[MikeB]

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

Saturday June 6, 3pm Boston time (21:00 Amsterdam time)

To connect:

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

(for UCI engines, add -fUCI)

HGM

How would one connect just to watch the tournament. It's been a while since I connected to a chess server - but would like to watch this tourney if I have the time. Thanks in advance for your response.

best regards,

Mike

[zd3nik]

I don't know which distro you are using, but a recent Polyglot is available from the Ubuntu repositories and as a Debian package. For other distros you could download the latest snapshot from my source repository, and install that from source. (Be sure to use the 'learn' branch.)

As for XBoard: don't forget to also include the argument --with-gtk with ./configure, when you build from source, and don't forget to "sudo make install". When you properly installed your engine (i.e. it is in a directory in your path), the command

xboard -zp -ics -icshost winboard.nl -fcp "ENGINECOMMAND" -fUCI

would be enough, although -keepAlive 5 will be helpful if you plan to leave the engine logged in for a long time unattended. (The ICS would log you out after an hour of inactivity.) And -icshelper timeseal would be useful if you are on a laggy connection, but you would have to acquire and install a Linux timeseal binary for that. (Should be obtainable from freechess.org .) Also do not forget that if your engine is not in a PATH directory, you must invoke it as ./ENGINECOMMAND in Linux (and possibly include a -fd PATH/TO/ENGINE/DIRECTORY if the engine is in another directory as where you start xboard)!

Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately none of this is the issue. It seems I'm not doing a very good job of describing what I need help with.

Just to clear up this part of the conversation: Polyglot is bundled with winboard and I can run my engines in winboard (locally) no problem. XBoard on the other hand doesn't include polyglot. But that's just a tangent. I'm fine with using winboard. So let's just ignore the xboard/polyglot thing and move on to the real issue...

You can login and try out now; the ICS is supposed to be up 24/7 (although sometimes maintenance on the rented VPS system takes it down), and you can login as a guest without much impairment of functionality. (Only for the automated tourney you need a registered account.)

Yes I can connect, I've done so multiple times now. And I can type guest and it logs me in. But there's no evidence that the engine options I gave on the command line did anything.

So the the thing I need help with is: what do I do after connecting as a guest in order to verify my engine is connected and able to play?