LittleBlitzer: Chess Tournament Manager

[Damir]

http://www.kimiensoftware.com/software/ ... tleblitzer

LittleBlitzer is a free Windows tournament manager program for UCI based chess engines. It was created to enable playing thousands of very fast games using multiple threads for chess engine testing purposes. It creates a PGN file designed to be used by Bayeselo or Elostat to give a final rating for each chess engine. It is useful for both chess programmers and chess testers as you can run tens of thousands of games at fast time controls in a fraction of the time you could with a traditional GUI interface.

Some of the major features:
Can allocate per-engine time with sub-millisecond accuracy.
Very low tournament overheads so you can allocate every available CPU to the chess engines. Utilises LittleThought's efficient move generation code to maximise performance.
Can run multiple engine vs engine games in parallel - for example, on a 4-core machine you can run 4 single-cpu matches, or on a 8-core machine you can run 4 dual-cpu matches.
Displays real time statistics on each engine's performance, and distinguishes between different types of game results such as loss by timeout or loss by illegal move.
Outputs PGN file for direct import into Bayeselo.
Supports Gauntlet or Round-Robin tournaments.
Supports Standard or Chess960 variants.
All engines can be configured separately.
Can set tournament level settings such as hash table size and time controls.
Can adjudicate games early based on specified criteria, to further speed up the tournament.
Supports starting positions loaded from FEN, EPD or PGN files.

[hgm]

So what changed since 5 years ago?

[perejaslav]

I am very sorry that this wonderful project was abandoned. All you have to do is make a few small edits and add some small options to get the best GUI for fast engine testing.

[pohl4711]

I am very sorry that this wonderful project was abandoned. All you have to do is make a few small edits and add some small options to get the best GUI for fast engine testing.

On my website you can find some helpful tools by T.Zipproth, to make LittleBlitzer even better and correct some serious bugs in LBG:
https://www.sp-cc.de/files/zipproth_lbg_tools.zip

But honestly, since cutechess-cli has the option to play an openings-set sequentially with repeated colors in a gauntlet-tournament, I see no need to use LittleBlitzer any longer. Cutechess-cli is better, now.

[Laskos]

I am very sorry that this wonderful project was abandoned. All you have to do is make a few small edits and add some small options to get the best GUI for fast engine testing.

On my website you can find some helpful tools by T.Zipproth, to make LittleBlitzer even better and correct some serious bugs in LBG:
https://www.sp-cc.de/files/zipproth_lbg_tools.zip

But honestly, since cutechess-cli has the option to play an openings-set sequentially with repeated colors in a gauntlet-tournament, I see no need to use LittleBlitzer any longer. Cutechess-cli is better, now.

Sometimes for sanity check in first use of an engine, I check things like NPS, time used, depth, etc. in LittleBlitzer, and only afterwards go to Cutechess-Cli.

[perejaslav]

Sometimes for sanity check in first use of an engine, I check things like NPS, time used, depth, etc. in LittleBlitzer, and only afterwards go to Cutechess-Cli.

Yes, exactly that missed in qtchess. Also I need a possibility to pause/resume tournaments. Banksia is a choice but it has some bugs on my system and crashes sometimes