Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!!

[Dann Corbit]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Dann Corbit at 25 February 2000 04:42:12:
Considering the fun "Crown" nomenclature from:
http://www.ginko.de/user/volker.pittlik ... sicht2.htm
I have an idea for a tournament. On equally prepared machines, have a round robin tournament for each program in a 'group of crowns' where each program plays each opponent as both white and black. You could use unequal machines, but then you would have to play 4 games for each pair of engines.
Four Crowns:
------------
AnMon
Comet
Crafty
Gromit
Little Goliath 2K
Phalanx
SOS
Three Crowns:
-------------
Amy
Ant
Arasan
Der Bringer
Dragon
Exchess
Fortress
GnuChess
InmiChess
La Dame Blanche
Lamb Chop
SSEChess
The Crazy Bishop
Techno
ZChess
[Suggestion -- Promote Lamb Chop and TCB (Both are 4 I think), maybe Bringer]
Two Crowns:
-----------
Amyan
Averno
Cilian
Colchess
DChess
Faile
Freyr
Monik
New Rival
OliThink (I have never been able to get OliThink to work, and after it leaves the engine running in memory forever until I kill it with NT task manager. How do you set this rascal up??)
SnailChess
Tristram
One Crown (or unknown crowns):
-------------------------
MFChess
Noonian
Pierre
Raffaela
Shaki
TSCP
Here's the idea:
After each tournament, the program that wins the tournament gets promoted to the next higher group, and the one that loses gets demoted to the next lower group.
The winner of the 4 Crown tournament will bear the title "The Official World's Strongest Freely Available Winboard Engine." This entry could also get a star next to its name in the legend.
Besides the four winning categories, there could be some other titles like "Strongest program with source code available" and maybe some boobie prizes as well like "Cellar Dweller" for the program that loses the bottom level tournament and "Crash King" for the one that crashes the most.

The author could be consulted to create the ideal Winboard.ini settings.
I think it might foster some fun and some healthy competition.

My FTP site

[Dann Corbit]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Dann Corbit at 25 February 2000 06:33:44:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!! geschrieben von:/posted by: Dann Corbit at 25 February 2000 04:42:12:
On February 25, 2000 at 00:12:21, Pete Galati wrote:
[snip]

I like the idea especially of a tournament of _only_ free download programs in
the tournament. Any ideas on how the matched machines would be selected (which
machine?) harder to do than it seems probably??
The 3 Crowns is probably the most grey catagory, but I like your method of
promoting and demoting between catagories, but the problem I see with that is
that it's likely that the one program(s) would shift back & forth between
catagories with every tournament.
Did you have any thought about haw many
tournaments this tournament would contain?
You're probably right, TCB and Chop are questionably placed in the three Crown
area, maybe not, I think Bringer is very realistic there strength wise, about
the strength of Arasan probably.

It sounds like a time consuming tournament, but has potential for involving
_many_ more programs.

If we play 4 games per pair, then the machines do not matter. Let's call the
machines A and B and programs 1 and 2. Then we have:
(game 1) A with program 1 as white verses B with program 2 as black
(game 2) A with program 1 as black verses B with program 2 as white
(game 3) A with program 2 as white verses B with program 1 as black
(game 4) A with program 2 as black verses B with program 1 as white
If we played G/30, then one set would be done in 3 hours or less. I'd prefer
40/2, but I know nobody will go along with that. We could also have a blitz
championship, since that could be run in a jiffy.
At the same time, program 1 could play 3 on another machine pair, and 2 could
play 3 on yet another, etc. In this way -- if we did everything right and had
enough volunteers -- we could complete the entire tournament in 3 hours with
hundreds of games played. But it would take a lot of volunteers.
I doubt if this would be a real problem, unless the others in its category were
very highly superior and the ones below highly inferior. And also, it would
assume that the author never tried to improve it. (or succeeded in improving
more slowly than the others).
4 high level tournaments which contain one sub-tournament for each round-robin
pair which suggests a pair of machines for each pair. You could get by with
less machines, but it would not be nearly so exciting.
Depends on how many machines participate. I'd like to see it run on a quarterly
basis. That way, it would not be too painful like running a contest once a
month would be and also give someone bragging rights for 4 months in each of the
winning categories. I also like the fact that there are a lot of winners.


My FTP site

[Mogens Larsen]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Mogens Larsen at 25 February 2000 11:17:35:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Repost of Pete G's response from CCC.. geschrieben von:/posted by: Dann Corbit at 25 February 2000 06:33:44:

If we played G/30, then one set would be done in 3 hours or less. I'd prefer
40/2, but I know nobody will go along with that. We could also have a blitz
championship, since that could be run in a jiffy.
At the same time, program 1 could play 3 on another machine pair, and 2 could
play 3 on yet another, etc. In this way -- if we did everything right and had
enough volunteers -- we could complete the entire tournament in 3 hours with
hundreds of games played. But it would take a lot of volunteers.

At the moment I'm conducting a between Crafty, AnMon, Phalanx, Comet, SOS and Amy with the timecontrol og G/90. There's four matches between engines, so every game takes between 8-12 hours. It's quite time consuming, but I'm not using my computer during the night anyway. Hopefully it'll be finished some time next week. Currently Crafty and SOS lead with around 70% of the points.
Best wishes...
Mogens

[Volker Pittlik]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Volker Pittlik at 25 February 2000 13:18:28:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!! geschrieben von:/posted by: Dann Corbit at 25 February 2000 04:42:12:

Considering the fun "Crown" nomenclature from:
http://www.ginko.de/user/volker.pittlik ... sicht2.htm
I have an idea for a tournament. On equally prepared machines, have a round robin tournament for each program in a 'group of crowns' where each program plays each opponent as both white and black. You could use unequal machines, but then you would have to play 4 games for each pair of engines.
Four Crowns:
------------
AnMon
Comet
Crafty
Gromit
Little Goliath 2K
Phalanx
SOS
Three Crowns:
-------------
Amy
Ant
Arasan
Der Bringer
Dragon
Exchess
Fortress
GnuChess
InmiChess
La Dame Blanche
Lamb Chop
SSEChess
The Crazy Bishop
Techno
ZChess
[Suggestion -- Promote Lamb Chop and TCB (Both are 4 I think), maybe Bringer]
Two Crowns:
-----------
Amyan
Averno
Cilian
Colchess
DChess
Faile
Freyr
Monik
New Rival
OliThink (I have never been able to get OliThink to work, and after it leaves the engine running in memory forever until I kill it with NT task manager. How do you set this rascal up??)
SnailChess
Tristram
One Crown (or unknown crowns):
-------------------------
MFChess
Noonian
Pierre
Raffaela
Shaki
TSCP
Here's the idea:
After each tournament, the program that wins the tournament gets promoted to the next higher group, and the one that loses gets demoted to the next lower group.
The winner of the 4 Crown tournament will bear the title "The Official World's Strongest Freely Available Winboard Engine." This entry could also get a star next to its name in the legend.
Besides the four winning categories, there could be some other titles like "Strongest program with source code available" and maybe some boobie prizes as well like "Cellar Dweller" for the program that loses the bottom level tournament and "Crash King" for the one that crashes the most.

The author could be consulted to create the ideal Winboard.ini settings.
I think it might foster some fun and some healthy competition.

I think this is a great idea. But why two machines? I don't believe many of the potential volunteers are having two identical computers. I suggest to play game in 30 minutes on dualboards (ponder on) and game in 45 on machines with one CPU (ponder off). On the other hand: if there are enough volunteers with two computers maybe we can add Rebel Decade and the Fritz demo to the tournament.


No problem for me.

That engine causes some trouble for me too, but it works and it is playing not to bad. Similar problems with Monik, MFChess and Pierre (Colchess is not running on my machine at all). I recommend to play a test round at blitz time control and after that to decide what to do with the troublemakers.

Yes good ideas, but we need some volunteers. My suggestion:
- Frank Quisinsky
- Djordje Vidanovic
- Kai Skibbe
- Mogens Larsen
- Christian Koch
- Christian Goralski
- Arnold Koschorreck
- Andreas Schwartmann
- Kurt Utzinger
- Paul Bedrey
- Gabor Szots
- WY
- Johan Havegheer
- Imran Hendley
- Uwe Kleinschmidt
- Sergio Martinez
- Brice Broisel
- Wolfgang Draeger
- Carlos E. A. Drake
-
Tournament director: Dann Corbit?
Volker

[Gabor Szots]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Gabor Szots at 25 February 2000 15:04:33:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Re: Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!! geschrieben von:/posted by: Volker Pittlik at 25 February 2000 13:18:28:
Hi fellows,
I like the idea, and I would take part gladly.
I suggest that we should take into account the speed and memory size of the different machines.
(1) On a slower machine, longer time controls shall be chosen, to make conditions equal.
(2) Under too short time controls the engine may not have enough time to fill the hash table.
We have to decide whether to use books and EGTB's. Not all programs can use them.
I have problems, too:
(1) With some programs, I have similar problems as Volker. For example, ColChess won't move at all, ExChess (Dann's version) seems not to use the book and EGTB's.
(2) I haven't yet downloaded several of the programs. As I have only limited internet access (only at the office), to get them I will have to wait till next week.
(3) I have only Nalimov 3- and 4-man tablebases.
None of these seems to be too serious.
I look forward to this tournament.
Kind regards,
Gabor

[Colin Frayn]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Colin Frayn at 25 February 2000 15:42:12:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!! geschrieben von:/posted by: Dann Corbit at 25 February 2000 04:42:12:

I have an idea for a tournament. On equally prepared machines, have a round robin tournament for each >program in a 'group of crowns' where each program plays each opponent as both white and black. You could >use unequal machines, but then you would have to play 4 games for each pair of engines.
After each tournament, the program that wins the tournament gets promoted to the next higher group, and >the one that loses gets demoted to the next lower group.
Besides the four winning categories, there could be some other titles like "Strongest program with source code >available"
and maybe some boobie prizes as well like "Cellar Dweller" for the program that loses the bottom level >tournament and "Crash King" for the one that crashes the most.

Sounds like a great idea to me!! Seeing as there aren't actually that many programs in each group, can't we just nominate four people to run the tournaments, one for each crown level. That way we wouldn't have to worry about setups. We could then just play 5 or 10 minute blitz games. 10 computers is 90 games to play. Even at 10 minutes per side, this is going to probably be less than 24 hours of play time. It would make the organisation hundreds (if not thousands) of times easier.
Hmmm.. short and catchy - I like it
Sounds cool It would be an interesting incentive, as you say, to get some work done on my code.
Cheers,
Colin


ColChess Homepage

[Colin Frayn]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Colin Frayn at 25 February 2000 16:04:58:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Re: Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!! geschrieben von:/posted by: Volker Pittlik at 25 February 2000 13:18:28:

(Colchess is not running on my machine at all).

Could you send me a debug file please? Several people have had this problem, and I have no idea why. I'm considering just removing the datafile and hardcoding it into the header files. That might help.
There are probably timing problems too, but they're platform specific. I think that everything is fine in Windows (and probably most other platforms now).
If anyone out there has tried the latest version and it doesn't work then please send me debug files including your platform & OS type and I'll see what I can do.
Cheers,
Col

ColChess Homepage

[Pete Galati]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Pete Galati at 25 February 2000 21:32:56:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Re: Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!! geschrieben von:/posted by: Gabor Szots at 25 February 2000 15:04:33:

Hi fellows,
I like the idea, and I would take part gladly.
I suggest that we should take into account the speed and memory size of the different machines.
(1) On a slower machine, longer time controls shall be chosen, to make conditions equal.
(2) Under too short time controls the engine may not have enough time to fill the hash table.
We have to decide whether to use books and EGTB's. Not all programs can use them.
I have problems, too:
(1) With some programs, I have similar problems as Volker. For example, ColChess won't move at all, ExChess (Dann's version) seems not to use the book and EGTB's.
(2) I haven't yet downloaded several of the programs. As I have only limited internet access (only at the office), to get them I will have to wait till next week.
(3) I have only Nalimov 3- and 4-man tablebases.
None of these seems to be too serious.
I look forward to this tournament.
Kind regards,
Gabor

As far as the books and tablebases go, I think if the program has that ability, it should be using them, I don't think it's realistic to take away a program's opening book.
Tablebases; here's a posible problem (or not) because while most people will be able to give up the 30mb space for 3 & 4 man tablebases, once the 5 man tablebases enter the picture, to get a whole set of 3,4,& 5 man tablebases, I hear that we'd be talking about approx _6Gb_ space, personally, I have no intention of ever giving up more than 2Gb to them, so my plan will be to use the group that Robert Hyatt uses with his Scrappy computer because that would be approx 2Gb.
Additionally, do all the programs on that list that use tablebases use Nalimov? If not, a posible problem, or not?
But does Dann's method of evening out things between different computers, will that be adaquate to adjust for the differences in collections of tablebases? I don't know.
Pete

[Dann Corbit]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Dann Corbit at 25 February 2000 21:51:15:
Als Antwort auf:/As an answer to: Re: Tournament idea -- battle of the crowns!!! geschrieben von:/posted by: Pete Galati at 25 February 2000 21:32:56:
For tablebase files, I suggest the 4 man files. You can get both Edwards and Nalimov (compressed and/or uncompressed) tablebase files from my ftp site. The files are 30 megabytes compressed. The Edwards and Nalimov uncompressed tablebase files are about 275 and 130 megs each set (IIRC) and the Nalimov compressed set is only 30 megs [DUH!]
If we could point all the programs to the same set of files, it would obviously save a lot of space.
Someone with more files than the 4 piece set should be able to use them if they choose.
I don't think tablebase files will make a big difference. They probably add less than 10 ELO, and the games rarely run till the board is that sparse.
Edwards 3&4-piece Tablebase files (33.7 megs compressed, 273 megs unzipped):
ftp://38.168.214.175/pub/Edwards.zip
Nalimov 3&4-piece Tablebase files (28 megs compressed, 149,377,381 unzipped):
ftp://38.168.214.175/pub/NALIMOV.ZIP
Nalimov 3&4-piece compressed Tablebase files (28 megs compressed, 30 megs unzipped):
ftp://38.168.214.175/pub/nalimovc.ZIP
Some programs can't use them. We should look into the individual program author's wishes if we have someone who wants to participate but for one reason or another cannot come up with tablebase files.


My FTP site