Scid vs. PC tournament improvements

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Scid vs. PC tournament improvements

Postby stevenaaus » 05 Mar 2012, 14:25

I've made a couple of improvements to Scid vs. PC's tournament
feature, and many xboard engines should behave much better.

I had a serious inaccuracy in the order of the time and move commands.
I issued move/times, when the expected order is times/move.

The other interesting bug relates to draw and resign
declarations. Sometimes engines issued them immediately after
making a move.

Engine: move h6h7
Engine: 1-0 {Black resigns}

I hadn't examined this closely before, and it screwed up the
control mechanism. (The opposing player is told to make a move,
but since the game becomes finished in the meantime, his move
is never processed, causing a vwait to hang forever).

Anyway support for Xboard engines should be much better now.
The changes are in subversion, and Windows users can use the
"make-scidgui.bat" utility to create a new scid.gui
stevenaaus
 
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Re: Scid vs. PC tournament improvements

Postby H.G.Muller » 05 Mar 2012, 15:23

Indeed, it is extremely annoying engines do this. Why make a move if you are going to resign? The GUI of course cannot afford to wait if there comes more, because nothing might come, and this would at best cause a bad timeout delay on every move. So it has to pass the move to the opponent as he gets it, and that sets the opponent thinking... And many WB engines cannot interrupt their search, so you have to wait it out, or the move will fall in the next game.

WinBoard relies on ping to solve this: it sends ping before a new game, so that it knows if a move coomes before the pong, it is still a left-over from the previous game, and can safely be ignored. But not all engines support ping either, and then it really is a mess.
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Re: Scid vs. PC tournament improvements

Postby stevenaaus » 18 Mar 2012, 10:38

I've added a Permanent Thinking feature (Xboard easy/hard and UCI ponder)
and done some tourney restructuring. This exe
http://sourceforge.net/projects/scidvsp ... e/download
is just a quick maintenance release (becaue of gremlins in the previous windows config file),
but also includes the new tournament code.
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