The limits of cutechess

[Rebel]

I have been playing matches of 100.000 games and cutechess somewhere in the range of 80.000 games crashes with a timeout on one of the engines. I suspect cutechess needs too much time to maintain the PGN.

And so I tried 75.000 games, it goes better, but after some time the same thing happens, one of the engines times out and cutechess aborts.

Playing 50.000 games all is okay.

Is there a workaround?

[smatovic]

As far as I got it, people use now fastchess:

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Fastch ... e_Manager)

https://github.com/Disservin/fastchess/

Less overhead they say.

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Srdja

[flok]

As far as I got it, people use now fastchess:

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Fastch ... e_Manager)

https://github.com/Disservin/fastchess/

Less overhead they say.

--
Srdja

I can confirm. With 31 threads, cutechess uses > 100% cpu. Fastchess on the other hand less than 1%.

[Steve Maughan]

As far as I got it, people use now fastchess:

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Fastch ... e_Manager)

https://github.com/Disservin/fastchess/

Less overhead they say.

--
Srdja

I was looking at FastChess — it's interesting. It doesn't seem to have opening book capabilities. The engine needs to use their own opening book.

— Steve

[flok]

As far as I got it, people use now fastchess:

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Fastch ... e_Manager)

https://github.com/Disservin/fastchess/

Less overhead they say.

--
Srdja

I was looking at FastChess — it's interesting. It doesn't seem to have opening book capabilities. The engine needs to use their own opening book.

— Steve

Yes it does:

-openings file=NAME format=(epd|pgn) [order=ORDER] [plies=PLIES] [start=START]
Specifies an opening book file and its format for game starting positions.
format - file format, either epd or pgn.
ORDER - order of openings (random or sequential). Default is sequential.
PLIES - number of plies for pgn. Defaults to max available plies.
START - starting index of the opening book. Default is 1.

[Steve Maughan]

As far as I got it, people use now fastchess:

https://www.chessprogramming.org/Fastch ... e_Manager)

https://github.com/Disservin/fastchess/

Less overhead they say.

--
Srdja

I was looking at FastChess — it's interesting. It doesn't seem to have opening book capabilities. The engine needs to use their own opening book.

— Steve

Yes it does:

-openings file=NAME format=(epd|pgn) [order=ORDER] [plies=PLIES] [start=START]
Specifies an opening book file and its format for game starting positions.
format - file format, either epd or pgn.
ORDER - order of openings (random or sequential). Default is sequential.
PLIES - number of plies for pgn. Defaults to max available plies.
START - starting index of the opening book. Default is 1.

Oh OK Thanks — I guess I was looking for Polyglot compatibility.

— Steve

[Ozymandias]

Years ago, before the utilities bills went trough the roof, I used to leave the PCs playing hundreds of thousands of games each, for months. I never experienced cutechess related crashes.

[Jouni]

I have used Cute Chess 1.2.0 GUI 4 years intensively without single crash.

[flok]

I have used Cute Chess 1.2.0 GUI 4 years intensively without single crash.

cutechess-cli crashed everytime here when terminating.
The chess programs themselves never crashed (I checked using coredumpctl).
With fastchess: 0 problems.

[mar]

I've played many games with cutechess-cli (still do), in the past when generating data for texeltuning I played 100k+ games at fast tc and never experienced any problems whatsoever.
I also play 16t and never noticed any measurable overhead either.

I'd make sure it's not some other problem before accusing cutechess.
apart from fastchess (haven't tried) there's also c-chess-cli