IWCCC 2012 Changes

[bob]

Let me take this chance to commend you for what you are trying to put together. If anyone has the ability and expertise- it would be you. You have more than proven that in the past.

I am speaking now of something I am only vaguely familiar with- but it seems I remember that Playchess and ICC have some precautions in place that greatly reduce the amount of cheating even attempted. Perhaps thinking about something that mimics their precautions might help.


Best,

george

Being there are Centaur accounts, the only fear for cheating is people dumping games to help friends. This is something I hope to avoid through sportsmanship.

This is meant to be a good, fun event. Nothing more.

Peter

When you offer cash prizes, human nature will come to the forefront, as always.

This is the reason the ICGA has used a simple format and ruleset for 40 years now.

[IanO]

Looks like instructions are still based on ICC, not Muller's FICS.

Could you update your pages to include the suggested winboard version and connection command?

Code: Select all

winboard -zp -ics -icshost 80.100.28.169 -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz [-fUCI]

or

Code: Select all

telnet 80.100.28.169 5000

if doing it by hand.

Your day-of-the-tournament page references automato, whereas Muller's server appears to use mamer for tournament direction. I'm not sure all the other ICC commands are relevant either. Instructions on how to register an account would also be useful. Which server's rating list will be used for seeding?

And to H.G.Muller: it would be nice to host another bot besides FairyMax so entrants could test running matches. (Unless FairyMax can play regular chess; that wasn't clear from its finger notes.)

[jdart]

Winboard/xboard can support UCI as well through an adapter.

But I would really like a console program that didn't have a UI but could act the same as the Winboard back-end, sending commands to the chess server on one side and sending commands to the engine on the other. (Why no UI? Well, among other things, I don't want to have to install X Windows on any machine I am using. Server-class machines usually don't have X installed by default).

I have been working on a side project to do this but it is going a bit slow. One issue is that ICC and FICS have interfaces that differ in details.

--Jon

[hgm]

Why not use ICSdrone then?

[hgm]

And to H.G.Muller: it would be nice to host another bot besides FairyMax so entrants could test running matches. (Unless FairyMax can play regular chess; that wasn't clear from its finger notes.)

I guess I have the Fairy-a bot refuse 'variant normal' through its -zippyVariants option. I don't really have any computer power to spare for running a serious bot. Fairy-Max is running on the same machine as the ICS, at lowered priority. But if I put too many bots on that machine, it might compete with the ICS too much for CPU. (It is only a 1.3GHz Celeron M, after all.)

Perhaps I an out a Chess bot on that machine with a formula that only accepts unrated blitz games. This should be good enough for testing. In the past, when I left on a Fairy-Max Chess bot, people started using it to up their ratings for standard TC, monopolizing the bot.

As to the seeding:

If, after all the accounts have been made, someone would give me a list of desired ratings, I guess I could edit those by hand in the ICS' player files.

[jdart]

I'll check it out. Docs seem to indicate it is for FICS and near derivatives only:

"chessclub.com - some features may work, others surely does not"

--Jon

[marcelk]

I'll check it out. Docs seem to indicate it is for FICS and near derivatives only:

"chessclub.com - some features may work, others surely does not"

--Jon

Icsdroneng works ok on HGM's ICS. I have used it before in the blitz events.

Only tournament mode on ICC might be tricky: it should work because some problems were solved, but needs testing to confirm and ICC doesn't run regular computer tournaments. Something to do with different formatting of game messages while in tournament mode.

[Peter Skinner]

Looks like instructions are still based on ICC, not Muller's FICS.

Could you update your pages to include the suggested winboard version and connection command?

Code: Select all

winboard -zp -ics -icshost 80.100.28.169 -icshelper timeseal -fcp ENGINE.exe -fd ENGINEFOLDER -autoKibitz [-fUCI]

or

Code: Select all

telnet 80.100.28.169 5000

if doing it by hand.

Your day-of-the-tournament page references automato, whereas Muller's server appears to use mamer for tournament direction. I'm not sure all the other ICC commands are relevant either. Instructions on how to register an account would also be useful. Which server's rating list will be used for seeding?

And to H.G.Muller: it would be nice to host another bot besides FairyMax so entrants could test running matches. (Unless FairyMax can play regular chess; that wasn't clear from its finger notes.)

Pages have been updated and a package is now provided to get people started with Winboard.

http://www.cctchess.com

[bob]

I'll check it out. Docs seem to indicate it is for FICS and near derivatives only:

"chessclub.com - some features may work, others surely does not"

--Jon

You know there is a way to run xboard on a machine that does not have X installed? I don't remember the procedure any longer, but someone pointed it out to me many years ago when I was starting our cluster stuff, and did not want to use remote X with 256 cores running at the same time, it added ridiculous network traffic and blocking issues that were terrible. The "x-less approach" worked just fine, you still run xboard, but the display goes into never-never-land somewhere and is never rendered anywhere, yet xboard thinks all is well...

[Peter Skinner]

I'll check it out. Docs seem to indicate it is for FICS and near derivatives only:

"chessclub.com - some features may work, others surely does not"

--Jon

You know there is a way to run xboard on a machine that does not have X installed? I don't remember the procedure any longer, but someone pointed it out to me many years ago when I was starting our cluster stuff, and did not want to use remote X with 256 cores running at the same time, it added ridiculous network traffic and blocking issues that were terrible. The "x-less approach" worked just fine, you still run xboard, but the display goes into never-never-land somewhere and is never rendered anywhere, yet xboard thinks all is well...

Don't you just add /nogui to the command line?

Peter