Tournaments in Winboard

[Robert Pope]

After failing to get satisfactory results with cutechess-cli, I'm turning to winboard to try to do some tournaments for my engine development. I've tried a couple round robins and have some questions:

1. How do I adjourn a tournament (to reboot the computer, or let someone else use it)? The pause command stops in the middle of a game. If I pause and then close winboard. Will it resume the interrupted game later? That's not ideal, since at a minimum, I've disrupted the hash table. I couldn't figure out how to have it finish a game and not start the next one.

2. Can you tell Winboard to use multiple instances (e.g. cutechess' concurrency command)?

3. When my test tournaments end, I get a pop-up like this:
36.5/40 Gerbil
26/40 uMax
21/40 JSBAM

But I had 6 programs in the tournament, not 3, confirmed by looking at the tournament PGN file. Why don't I get results for the other 3?

Thanks,
Rob

[H.G.Muller]

1. How do I adjourn a tournament (to reboot the computer, or let someone else use it)? The pause command stops in the middle of a game. If I pause and then close winboard. Will it resume the interrupted game later? That's not ideal, since at a minimum, I've disrupted the hash table. I couldn't figure out how to have it finish a game and not start the next one.

You click "Mode -> Machine Match" again. This will drop WinBoard out of match mode, so that no new game is started after the current one finished. You can in general use this menu item to switch WinBoard out of or (back) into Match Mode, where 'Match Mode' means playing the tourney when a tourney file is specified, and just playing the two currently loaded engines in an old-style match when it is not. (The checkmark next to the menu item will not disappear before the game finishes. Perhaps I should grey out the item in the mean time, so that there is some optical feedback.) An alternative is to just close WinBoard, but then you will lose the game in progress. WinBoard will then replay that when you resume the tournament. There is no way to suspend a game and resume it after a power down without affecting the game; this is an engine limitation.

2. Can you tell Winboard to use multiple instances (e.g. cutechess' concurrency command)?

This works in a slightly different way: you don't have to specify in advance how many games you want to run in parallel. You just start new WinBoard instances using the same tournament file, and they will divide the games between them. If you have made the proposed file-type associations when installing WinBoard, you can add a new 'worker' to the tourney by double-clicking on the tourney file of that tourney. Otherwise you start WinBoard, open the Tournament dialog, browse to the tourney file of the tournament you want it to work for, and OK the dialog. When you specify an existing Tourney file WinBoard takes all info from there, and ignores the rest of the dialog.

This way you can increase and decrease the number of games played in parallel at any time during the tourney.

3. When my test tournaments end, I get a pop-up like this:
36.5/40 Gerbil
26/40 uMax
21/40 JSBAM

But I had 6 programs in the tournament, not 3, confirmed by looking at the tournament PGN file. Why don't I get results for the other 3?

The popup is just a quick reminder of who has won the tourney. The idea was that one would not only want to see the standings at the end of a tourney, but also during it, and, more importantly, long after the tourney had finished. There already exist many PGN-to-Crosstable converters, and it seemed pointless to put this functionality also in WinBoard. There is an option "-afterGame" where you can specify a command to run after every tournament game, and this you could use to specify the cross-table generator on the tourney's PGN file. You can then at any time see the standings by looking in this file (e.g. open it in wour web browser, and refresh it).

[Gábor Szots]

When you specify an existing Tourney file WinBoard takes all info from there, and ignores the rest of the dialog.

Just noticed this thread by accident but it reminded me that for me it is slightly confusing that after specifying an existing tournament file the rest of the dialog remains unaltered, as though I were in the process of creating the tourney. I'd like to have the fields filled according to the tournament file or maybe greyed out.

As an aside, I'd prefer to have gauntlet as the default tournament format. I accept that it may not be everyone's choice.

Best regards,