Needed for next ACCA event

[CRoberson]

Instead of requiring all to submit logfiles in real-time or post game.
I'd like to log all of the kibitz info from all games at once. This may
mean that I have to startup a monitor of all games but that is ok.

Does HGM's new xboard mods allow that? If not is it doable?

[bob]

Instead of requiring all to submit logfiles in real-time or post game.
I'd like to log all of the kibitz info from all games at once. This may
mean that I have to startup a monitor of all games but that is ok.

Does HGM's new xboard mods allow that? If not is it doable?

Logging is easy enough. You just log on to icc, using a simple telnet connection, like this: "telnet chessclub.com | tee log". Then you log in normally and observe every game. The kibitzes will be intermixed of course.

[CRoberson]

Logging is easy enough. You just log on to icc, using a simple telnet connection, like this: "telnet chessclub.com | tee log". Then you log in normally and observe every game. The kibitzes will be intermixed of course.

That works and I could grep out all from a particular engine. I was hopping for something that would put individual games in separate files,
but that is a start. Thanks.

[hgm]

Does HGM's new xboard mods allow that? If not is it doable?

Yes, the latest XBoard supports that. If you observe a game in -autoKibitz mode, the kibitz of both engines will be captured, and be visible in the Engine-Output window. When you have set a -saveGameFile, and -pgnExtendedInfo true, then the observed games will be automatically saved with the kibitzed engine scores in them.

So it should be possible to start an XBoard for each participant, and have it follow that participant for the entire tournament. I understand that there are ICS commands to do that. You would collect each game twice that way, of course, but a little redundancy might increase reliability for if one of the bots gets disconnected. You could later only select games where the followed player was white, before combining the PGNs of the different bots.

Note that this will only work if participants would Kibitz in a recognizable format. So you will have to enforce such at format in the tournament rules. This condition is automatically satisfied for participants that use WinBoard as interface in -autoKibitz mode.

Current WinBoard recognizes any Kibitz line that starts with !!! score/depth as the score and depth of the move hat was actually played. Engines could still kibitz other info on the same line, or give kibitz info for other iterations; such extra kibitz info will appear in the Engine-Output window, but only lines starting with !!! will be used for in the PGN.

[CRoberson]

Does HGM's new xboard mods allow that? If not is it doable?

Yes, the latest XBoard supports that. If you observe a game in -autoKibitz mode, the kibitz of both engines will be captured, and be visible in the Engine-Output window. When you have set a -saveGameFile, and -pgnExtendedInfo true, then the observed games will be automatically saved with the kibitzed engine scores in them.

So it should be possible to start an XBoard for each participant, and have it follow that participant for the entire tournament. I understand that there are ICS commands to do that. You would collect each game twice that way, of course, but a little redundancy might increase reliability for if one of the bots gets disconnected. You could later only select games where the followed player was white, before combining the PGNs of the different bots.

Note that this will only work if participants would Kibitz in a recognizable format. So you will have to enforce such at format in the tournament rules. This condition is automatically satisfied for participants that use WinBoard as interface in -autoKibitz mode.

Current WinBoard recognizes any Kibitz line that starts with !!! score/depth as the score and depth of the move hat was actually played. Engines could still kibitz other info on the same line, or give kibitz info for other iterations; such extra kibitz info will appear in the Engine-Output window, but only lines starting with !!! will be used for in the PGN.

Startung an xboard session for each match sounds like multiple logins. ICC doesn't allow that (I think). Each time I've tried a a
second login with the same uid the first one gets logged out. Your suggestion sounds like I need multiple logins but that doesn;t work.

[hgm]

Yes, ICC is an unfriendly environment for such events. But I don't think that any ICS of this type would allow multiple logins under the same account. Each bot would need its own account of course.

I am not sure that guests can observe games on ICC. If not, you would need an extra registered account for each bot you want to run. But I am sure that for you, as an organizer, it would be no problem to obtain those. Especialy as they will not actually be used to play chess.

You can have multiple logins from the same IP address, although I don't know if there is a limit on the number. I never tried more than two logins from the same computer. ICC did seem aware of my IP: it refused to play rated games between my two programs because they were logged in from the same IP address. But if that is a problem we could simply distribute the effort of collecting the games over a few machines.

[bob]

Yes, ICC is an unfriendly environment for such events. But I don't think that any ICS of this type would allow multiple logins under the same account. Each bot would need its own account of course.

I am not sure that guests can observe games on ICC. If not, you would need an extra registered account for each bot you want to run. But I am sure that for you, as an organizer, it would be no problem to obtain those. Especialy as they will not actually be used to play chess.

You can have multiple logins from the same IP address, although I don't know if there is a limit on the number. I never tried more than two logins from the same computer. ICC did seem aware of my IP: it refused to play rated games between my two programs because they were logged in from the same IP address. But if that is a problem we could simply distribute the effort of collecting the games over a few machines.

I think this needs a programmed solution. One can certainly observe many games on ICC. and the "program" that is running (writing a program to create a TCP/IP connection to port 5000, logging in, and observing a list of games is certainly easy enough) needs to simply open a set of files, and write any output from a specific game to the correct file. This would solve the problem and could be made to capture or exclude non-player kibitzes as desired.

[hgm]

Why write a new program if a solution is already available that is guaranteed to work? You might encounter all kinds of unexpected problems in developing something new. For instance, do you know with certainty that there is no limit to the number of games one can observe simultaneously on an ICS? Or the number of users that one can "follow" simultaneously? All these could be show stoppers for the solution you propose.

[bob]

Why write a new program if a solution is already available that is guaranteed to work? You might encounter all kinds of unexpected problems in developing something new. For instance, do you know with certainty that there is no limit to the number of games one can observe simultaneously on an ICS? Or the number of users that one can "follow" simultaneously? All these could be show stoppers for the solution you propose.

It is easy enough to test. Otherwise there is no "existing solution" to this problem except for creating N new accounts and have each one run a simple application that connects and observes a single game.

I have the code to connect to ICC already, since I have had a custom ICC interface for 15 years now. It would need to have the crafty interface removed, and then code added to recognize the game number and direct that output to a unique file.

It is not exactly rocket science...

BTW I just did a quick test and observed 20 games simultaneously with no problems. Hard to watch of course, but this would not need a GUI anyway.

[hgm]

Well, creating N new accounts is a proven solution that will certainly work. We know ICS are designed to handle thousands of accounts and allow many hundreds of them to be logged in at any time.

Of course if you are willing to develop something to do this with a single bot it would be more than welcome. Beware that it is not only important how many games you can observe (and 20 might not be enough), but also how many handles you can follow simultaneously.