Winboard Forum

Hello,
I want to make a comparison of many engines with different evaluation settings in a tournament using winboard. Because of the large number of games needed for this I try a multithreaded approach, but it costs many resources of my computer. I'm thinking about using a chess server like fics to let the engines play there against each other instead on my computer.
If this is possible: How can I do this with winboard via command line and how do i get the result?

cpp

Not sure what exactly you have in mind. FICS does not run any engines for you, it is just a connection device.

H.G.Muller wrote:Not sure what exactly you have in mind. FICS does not run any engines for you, it is just a connection device.

Thanks for answer. I thought it is possible to run engines on chess servers like fics directly in games and use them for computation of the engine moves as well. But if you can use them just for connection, this will not work for sure.

cpp

Indeed this is not the case. When people say the are "running their engine on FICS", what they actually mean is that they are running their engine on their own computer at home, but leave it connected to FICS, so that people (or engines runing on computers in somebody else's home that are likewise connected to FICS) can play against it.

Of course this can in principle still save you half the time, as you don't have to run the opponent, but the problem is that you have not much control over which opponents will play you. In fact you must be prepared that no other computer wants to play yours at all; many computers there are configured to only play humans.

If you want to run engines in a server, you can rent RYBKA 4 cluster but is very expensive. You can buy a 16 core computer for the prize of one day rent.

Your best bet, in my humble opinion is to learn the in and outs of the tournament manager included with WinBoard.

Another solution, but very impractical for those not familiar with it, is to use YaY or YaYp to have two computers (or the same computer with two IDs) play in Yahoo or POGO respectively. If interested check: http://www.autochess.com/forum/

Regards,