Any interest in an on-line blitz engine tourney?

[hgm]

Now that I have learned how easy it is to set up your very own "FICS @ home", the idea has come up to hold more frequent on-line tourneys, similar to CCT11. We could do that any time we like; the only thing that is required is that one of us runs Linux on a PC, starts up the server there, and opens port 5000 in his firewall. We could then all login as guests (under our own name), or let someone with admin rights on the server quickly add a registered account for everyone that shows up as a guest. This just takes a two commands (addplayer and asetpasswd), so it can be done in a matter of seconds.

Is there any interest here to try this out? I would like to conduct a field test for my ICS, to get an idea how large a load on the up-load link this would create, and how many players and observers we can afford before this becomes a problem.

So my idea was to have a blitz tourney (to not compete with CCT11 too much), of, say 5+1 games. A meaningful test would need at least 8 external players (i.e. not playing from my internal network, where I would be running the ICS, and which has a very high bandwidth compared to my up-load link).

Please, everyone that is interested to participate in such an event, make it known below what day of the week or time of day would suit you best for such an event. I don't care if you are programmer or operator or cloner. If you have a computer with an internet connection on which you can runn a chess engine, you are welcome to participate in this test. There are no prizes or titles to be awarded, and we might have to abort the attempt when it turns out my internet connection is not up to the task. But it could be fun!

[swami]

Unfortunately I don't have an account at FICS. I cannot register in there, since it doesn't allow one to register with Msn, gmail, yahoo emails addresses.

[hgm]

You missed the point. This is not on FICS. This is on my own private server, which is a FICS clone. Except that I am the admin, and can add and delete accounts at will.

[pedrox]

Now that I have learned how easy it is to set up your very own "FICS @ home", the idea has come up to hold more frequent on-line tourneys, similar to CCT11. We could do that any time we like; the only thing that is required is that one of us runs Linux on a PC, starts up the server there, and opens port 5000 in his firewall. We could then all login as guests (under our own name), or let someone with admin rights on the server quickly add a registered account for everyone that shows up as a guest. This just takes a two commands (addplayer and asetpasswd), so it can be done in a matter of seconds.

Is there any interest here to try this out? I would like to conduct a field test for my ICS, to get an idea how large a load on the up-load link this would create, and how many players and observers we can afford before this becomes a problem.

So my idea was to have a blitz tourney (to not compete with CCT11 too much), of, say 5+1 games. A meaningful test would need at least 8 external players (i.e. not playing from my internal network, where I would be running the ICS, and which has a very high bandwidth compared to my up-load link).

Please, everyone that is interested to participate in such an event, make it known below what day of the week or time of day would suit you best for such an event. I don't care if you are programmer or operator or cloner. If you have a computer with an internet connection on which you can runn a chess engine, you are welcome to participate in this test. There are no prizes or titles to be awarded, and we might have to abort the attempt when it turns out my internet connection is not up to the task. But it could be fun!

I would like an online tournament blitz

[Matthias Gemuh]

Now that I have learned how easy it is to set up your very own "FICS @ home", the idea has come up to hold more frequent on-line tourneys, similar to CCT11. We could do that any time we like; the only thing that is required is that one of us runs Linux on a PC, starts up the server there, and opens port 5000 in his firewall. We could then all login as guests (under our own name), or let someone with admin rights on the server quickly add a registered account for everyone that shows up as a guest. This just takes a two commands (addplayer and asetpasswd), so it can be done in a matter of seconds.

Is there any interest here to try this out? I would like to conduct a field test for my ICS, to get an idea how large a load on the up-load link this would create, and how many players and observers we can afford before this becomes a problem.

So my idea was to have a blitz tourney (to not compete with CCT11 too much), of, say 5+1 games. A meaningful test would need at least 8 external players (i.e. not playing from my internal network, where I would be running the ICS, and which has a very high bandwidth compared to my up-load link).

Please, everyone that is interested to participate in such an event, make it known below what day of the week or time of day would suit you best for such an event. I don't care if you are programmer or operator or cloner. If you have a computer with an internet connection on which you can runn a chess engine, you are welcome to participate in this test. There are no prizes or titles to be awarded, and we might have to abort the attempt when it turns out my internet connection is not up to the task. But it could be fun!

Unfortunately my WB engines don't know about the internet yet.
How long can it take a newbie to learn and implement FICS connectivity ?

Matthias.

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

You missed the point. This is not on FICS. This is on my own private server, which is a FICS clone. Except that I am the admin, and can add and delete accounts at will.

Damn Muller,are you becoming a cloner too

[hgm]

Unfortunately my WB engines don't know about the internet yet.
How long can it take a newbie to learn and implement FICS connectivity ?

Matthias.

If you use WinBoard, not very long. The way a FICS-like server communicates is horribly primitive (very similar to controlling your PC from a command-prompt box). But the tourney will be almost totally automated. You only would have to connect by starting up WinBoard with the proper options, and login (type name and password). The tourney manager will make the pairings and automatically start your engine against the proper opponent whenever needed.

And....

your engines could play Capablanca or Bird on this server as well!

[Tord Romstad]

Sounds fun. Count me in.

Tord

[hgm]

I can't say the enthousiasm is overwhelming so far...

Is there really no one except Tord that wants his engine to play a blitz tourney?

[michiguel]

I can't say the enthousiasm is overwhelming so far...

Is there really no one except Tord that wants his engine to play a blitz tourney?

Gaviota would play too!

It would nice to have something like a monthly blitz or so. The time control should be relatively fast to facilitate people to be present for a little while. It should be for fun anyway!

Miguel