CSVN Programmer's Tournament is underway

[mvk]

The Baron by Richard Pijl has won the tournament:

http://www.computerschaak.nl/pt46-round-1.

Congrats to Richard! Dirty came in 2nd.

Arasan finished 4th, behind Rookie. Generally it did ok but mysteriously dropped a Rook in the 2nd round game against DBP/PuppetMaster - not sure what happened there.

--Jon

You probably saw unrefreshed standings (those after round 6). Arasan 2nd! Sadly, Arena lost the game against PuppetMaster for you.

[hgm]

I think this was 3.5. But you would really have to ask Richard. I just pre-informed you so that you don't waste too much time on debugging Arasan to no end.

[pijl]

I also dropped you an email about this.
We did some factfinding and the loss against puppetmaster was (as usual in these cases) a combination of factors.

We were using Arena 3.5 as we could not get the GUI that we are basically always using in tournaments where we have the choice (Shredder) to work with the remote arasan as the plink application (to setup the SSH tunnel and start arasan) requires commandline arguments. I tried to trick it with a batchfile, but that did not work. So we switched to the latest Arena 3.5 which did allow this. But as both Tessa and me were inexperienced users of this interface and got lost in where certain options were located, the one-click option was still enabled.
An accidental double click caused Rd2 to be played instantly (which is imho strange as it was the engine's turn to play, the interface should not allow a move to be made for the engine). To make matters worse, by the time I was asked to help, the wifi router refused internet connectivity. So I concentrated at getting Arasan back online, not really looking at what happened before. So play continued from the position after Rd2. Only after the game, when I heard Arasan lost we went back to this position and saw how things must have gone wrong.
I'm terribly sorry about this, especially when it turned out that this mistake possibly did cost Arasan the tournament victory.

[jdart]

This is Richard's explanation:

As you know, I could not get the GUI of preference (Shredder) to work with a remote arasan as it does not allow sending commandline arguments. And I needed that for the plink application. So I switched to Arena 3.5 which I thought should be rather stable by now and a good alternative despite the fact that Tessa was not really used to it.
Unfortunately, as it was a fresh installation all kinds of options were turned on that makes life of some users easier, but life of a tournament operator rather difficult. I found some of them and turned them off, but forgot about the 'one-click' entry option. What happened was that Tessa entered a move for puppetmaster, tapped first on the destination square, and then tapped on the square of origin. Unfortunately she tapped twice, which resulted in Arena to enter the losing blunder. Tessa thought Arasan moved instantly and executed the move on the board. And then she discovered Arasan was not thinking. And as usual, Murphy's law emerged here and the wifi in the building was gone. So, instead of focussing on the problem why Arasan was not thinking anymore, I focussed on getting connectivity back and arasan thinking on the position. As Arasan was playing black and Arasan showed a minus score I did not think much of the large score (still not really looking at the board) and thought it would be winning soon. Unfortunately, Arena showed the score from its own point of view, meaning that it was actually losing.
After that game we did the rootcause analysis and came to the conclusion above. Needless to say we hunted for that one-click option and turned it off. No further incidents (except for occasional connection losses requiring a restart of Arasan) happened and we continued with the tournament.

So, too bad about round 2 but glitches things happen, and usually at the worst time during a tournament. That's computer chess.

--Jon

[jdart]

This is Richard's explanation:

As you know, I could not get the GUI of preference (Shredder) to work with a remote arasan as it does not allow sending commandline arguments. And I needed that for the plink application. So I switched to Arena 3.5 which I thought should be rather stable by now and a good alternative despite the fact that Tessa was not really used to it.
Unfortunately, as it was a fresh installation all kinds of options were turned on that makes life of some users easier, but life of a tournament operator rather difficult. I found some of them and turned them off, but forgot about the 'one-click' entry option. What happened was that Tessa entered a move for puppetmaster, tapped first on the destination square, and then tapped on the square of origin. Unfortunately she tapped twice, which resulted in Arena to enter the losing blunder. Tessa thought Arasan moved instantly and executed the move on the board. And then she discovered Arasan was not thinking. And as usual, Murphy's law emerged here and the wifi in the building was gone. So, instead of focussing on the problem why Arasan was not thinking anymore, I focussed on getting connectivity back and arasan thinking on the position. As Arasan was playing black and Arasan showed a minus score I did not think much of the large score (still not really looking at the board) and thought it would be winning soon. Unfortunately, Arena showed the score from its own point of view, meaning that it was actually losing.
After that game we did the rootcause analysis and came to the conclusion above. Needless to say we hunted for that one-click option and turned it off. No further incidents (except for occasional connection losses requiring a restart of Arasan) happened and we continued with the tournament.

So, too bad about round 2 but glitches happen, and usually at the worst time during a tournament. That's computer chess.

--Jon

[pijl]

As far as I could see, it was not a fault of Arasan, but a problem of insufficient experience with Arena of both Tessa and me (as I was responsible for the setup of the system), some unexpected behaviour of Arena and a network outage at the same time which made me focus on the wrong things while trying to get it back online.
But even then I expected Arasan to win the tournament by winning the remaining games after the demonstration of it against Baron in the first round. But Dirty did not cooperate...

[jdart]

I have put up some analysis of this game here:

http://arasanchess.org/games.shtml

--Jon