On-line engine blitz tourney November

[mvanthoor]

All the Raspberry Pi participants have disappeared. There were a lost of those.

Indeed, of course the PI engines of Marcel are missing since his passing, the PI engines of Folkert are missing too. At the moment Volker Annuss is the only one with his PI engine permanently online.

This is why I always keep a few engines running on a single core Intel atom which gives about the same performance as the RPI3 (between 0.5 and 1.0 mnps). It is also very handy to have a few engines permanently online for testing purposes.

The server runs under a Hyper-V virtual machine on a 6 core Intel machine, unfortunately the server software is not multi threaded, with a lot of participants (especially when it has to start a new series of games) it gets rather slow.

If the regular participants don't mind, I'm thinking about participating in this tournament with Rustic, after I add a transposition table to the engine (otherwise it won't be able to see further than about 7 ply in the middle game). I could run the engine twice; once on a 6700K (now at +/- 4 million NPS, without hashtable), or on a raspberry pi 4 (haven't tried it there yet). I also have an i3-6100 NUC, where the engine runs at +/- 2 million NPS; about half the speed of the 6700K. Everything is single threaded for now.

Is there an IRC channel or discord channel somewhere while the tournament is running or something, or do you just add the engine to the tournament with the above command and we wait until it finishes?

PS: In the first few attempts, I don't expect to finish anywhere but last

[D Sceviour]

Coming up with a good evaluation function has always been the hardest and most time consuming part of an engine, whether that be training a neural network, or coming up with new terms for a handcrafted evaluation and tuning it.

Not necessarily. In the early days of programming I spent the most time on the Search() function. Parts like null move search, late move reduction re-searching and principle-variation had not been invented yet, or had not been refined. Today, programmers take these things for granted.

[Joost Buijs]

The slowdown with hash >2GB is something that I see over here too, basically due to pressure on the TLB, allocating the hash-table in large page memory helps a lot to reduce the slowdown, this is what I default do (if the OS allows it).

Do you use separate hash-tables for each thread? Probably not, I use separate pawn hash-tables, the main hash-table is shared between all threads otherwise it wouldn't be very useful.

Schooner uses a shared hash table. I meant that the total amount for hash size is calculated as a linear increase with the number of threads = 256 Mb x number of threads.

I am using Windows 10 Home edition which apparently disallows large page settings. This has to be set in the Group Policy Editor "gpedit.msc", but the use of gpedit is supposed to be only allowed in the Professional edition of Windows 10. Is the Windows upgrade really worth it? grrr.

Another alternative is to use Linux for large pages. This is supposed to be easier. However the version of Ubuntu I use is packed with restrictions on viewing folders. It seems like an endless battle with these new operating systems.

Probably it's just a registry setting to allow you to lock pages in memory. There are several web-shops (also here in Holland) selling perfectly legal Windows 10 Pro Keys for 10 to 20 euros. Since I run many machines (also for my family) I bought several of them and never had an issue with it.

[Joost Buijs]

All the Raspberry Pi participants have disappeared. There were a lost of those.

Indeed, of course the PI engines of Marcel are missing since his passing, the PI engines of Folkert are missing too. At the moment Volker Annuss is the only one with his PI engine permanently online.

This is why I always keep a few engines running on a single core Intel atom which gives about the same performance as the RPI3 (between 0.5 and 1.0 mnps). It is also very handy to have a few engines permanently online for testing purposes.

The server runs under a Hyper-V virtual machine on a 6 core Intel machine, unfortunately the server software is not multi threaded, with a lot of participants (especially when it has to start a new series of games) it gets rather slow.

If the regular participants don't mind, I'm thinking about participating in this tournament with Rustic, after I add a transposition table to the engine (otherwise it won't be able to see further than about 7 ply in the middle game). I could run the engine twice; once on a 6700K (now at +/- 4 million NPS, without hashtable), or on a raspberry pi 4 (haven't tried it there yet). I also have an i3-6100 NUC, where the engine runs at +/- 2 million NPS; about half the speed of the 6700K. Everything is single threaded for now.

Is there an IRC channel or discord channel somewhere while the tournament is running or something, or do you just add the engine to the tournament with the above command and we wait until it finishes?

PS: In the first few attempts, I don't expect to finish anywhere but last

There are other weak engines so you never know what will happen.

There are several options to interface your engine with an ICS server, the most common are Winboard/Xboard or icsDrone.
Xboard/Winboard contain a GUI this enables you to watch the games as they go on, it also enables you to chat with other participants.
icsDrone has no GUI and just connects your engine with the server, in this case you need a second (human) account and Xboard/Winboard if you want to watch the games live.

XBoard and icsDrone use the CECP protocol, if your engine uses UCI then you have to translate from UCI to CECP and vise versa, this can be done with Polyglot or UCI2WB. The Winboard installer instals this software automatically, maybe for Xboard (Linux) you have to do it separately, I don't know.

HGM is the Winboard/Xboard expert, he can probably tell you much more about it.

[mvanthoor]

There are other weak engines so you never know what will happen.

There are several options to interface your engine with an ICS server, the most common are Winboard/Xboard or icsDrone.
Xboard/Winboard contain a GUI this enables you to watch the games as they go on, it also enables you to chat with other participants.
icsDrone has no GUI and just connects your engine with the server, in this case you need a second (human) account and Xboard/Winboard if you want to watch the games live.

XBoard and icsDrone use the CECP protocol, if your engine uses UCI then you have to translate from UCI to CECP and vise versa, this can be done with Polyglot or UCI2WB. The Winboard installer instals this software automatically, maybe for Xboard (Linux) you have to do it separately, I don't know.

HGM is the Winboard/Xboard expert, he can probably tell you much more about it.

Thanks for the information.

The engine will also support CECP / XBoard next to UCI; I'll be implementing them both.

Also, I don't intend for the engine to stay weak

[RubiChess]

User right assigment on Windows Home without gpedit:

Powershell solution: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/s ... r-26e259b0
NTRights (old Reskit Tool): https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/881 ... -10-a.html

Regards, Andreas

[Ras]

maybe for Xboard (Linux) you have to do it separately, I don't know.

Polyglot is easily installed via the package manager. At least on my distro, it wasn't installed as Xboard dependency IIRC. The more difficult part is the time seal utility which I had to compile from source, using openseal.

[Pi4Chess]

Hello all,

Madrid time zone there ^

Hopefully i will be there for the next tournament if i am available since Joost created an account for my Raspberry pi 4 running with Ubuntu Mate 64

account name = rpi4chess

It seems that my xboard does not save the internal parameters of the engine. I must change Move overhead and add the book everytime after i login in. Common options like hash are saved.

Do you know if there is a way to save the internal parameters of the engine once for all.If not possible hopefully when tournament is going to begin we will have enough time to configure that before launching the matches ?

[Ras]

when tournament is going to begin we will have enough time to configure that before launching the matches ?

I can't answer on Xboard, but you can log in to the tournament a few minutes before the tournament starts so that you have enough time for manual settings.

[Pi4Chess]

I can't answer on Xboard, but you can log in to the tournament a few minutes before the tournament starts so that you have enough time for manual settings.

Ok Nice then