On-line engine blitz tourney February

[Joost Buijs]

The monthly on-line engine blitz tournament for February will take place on:

Saturday, February 14, 2:00 PM EST (Boston time) 20:00 CET (Amsterdam time)

To connect, use the following command:

winboard -zp -ics -icshost nightmare-chess.nl -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz -keepAlive 30
(For UCI engines, add -fUCI)

If you don’t have an account, please submit a request to admin@nightmare-chess.nl.

Our tournament manager will be Eendje (Lisebeth @ ICC).

The format will be 9 rounds, Swiss system, 5/1 time control.

Lisebeth prefers to start the tournament on the hour, so please log in 15 minutes early. Late entries are not supported.

PS.

It appears that last month’s server crash was caused by the timeseal decoder, which also brought down the chess daemon and mamer.

Since I don’t have the source code for the timeseal decoder, it’s impossible to determine exactly what went wrong.

The annoying part is that mamer does not save intermediate results, so after a crash the tournament has to be considered lost.

As a precaution, I have replaced the server hardware and reinstalled Linux from scratch.

This was only the second crash in seven years, so the chance of it happening again is small — let’s hope for the best.