On-line engine blitz tourney March

[hgm]

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

Saturday March 21, 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)

[Engin]

good, i had expected this last week, but ok better late then nothing

[Daniel Anulliero]

Hi hg
I sent you a pm 😉

[op12no2]

I really like these tourney's and would like to participate but it's gong to be tough to get back in time for the start. Is there any way to not get timed out after logging in, and doing an early mam join 1...? I seem to get timed out after about 4 or 5 minutes...

[Modern Times]

There is a "keep alive" parameter that I use, I think it is -KeepAlive 5 or something like that. I can confirm when I next get to my PC.

HG can auto-join you in the tournament if he thinks your engine and internet conenction are reliable enough to run unattended.

[op12no2]

Hi Ray,

Thanks, that seems to be working - it's sending a date command every N minutes. I'll do that on Sat just in case I'm late (after Super Saturday 6 Nations) as long as HG is happy with ppl doing it. And presumably it doesn't affect anything when one is mid game.

Do we know if it's the server dis-connecting or our client machines; if the later we can presumably tweak a timeout somewhere...?

[hgm]

The ICS on its default setting logs you out after 1 hour. An admin can change this to any other value, and on my old ICS I had enlarged it to 10 hours, but I don't remember how I did that, and now that XBoard had the keepAlive option there seemed no need for it anyway.

If you get disconnected after 5 min or so, you can be sure that it was not by ICS action, but that there must be some other impatient element in your connection. But the -keepAlive activity usually helps against that too, e.g. by setting it to 1 min.

WinBoard should even exit when no responce to the 'date' command comes in before it sends the next, so in principle you could run it from a script that reconnects in this case.

[op12no2]

OK, thanks. I'll use keepAlive. Could you to auto-join me if I'm a bit late please?

[hgm]

Sure. If I see your engine logged in, I will join it.

[Henk]

Are there no sponsors for this major event ?