Moderators: hgm, Andres Valverde
======
SIMULS
======
It has been discovered that Zippy can play simuls on ICC (but not on
FICS). If you arrange for Zippy to send the ICC command "simulize" in
the -zippyGameStart string, it will accept additional games while
playing. Zippy will use the same engine for every game, so whenever
it switches opponents, the engine's state will be reset with the "new"
command. This will of course weaken its play, so don't enable simuls
if you want your engine to have the highest possible rating.
Zippy was never designed to work with simuls; it just works by
accident, and it hasn't been tested much. So please report any bugs
you notice, but don't expect them to be fixed rapidly.
Be sure to use xboard/WinBoard 4.2.4 or later for simuls, because some
obscure bugs are fixed in that version that affect starting a game in
the middle (as with resuming from adjournments or switching opponents
in a simul).
As noted under -zippyPlay above, you should have -getMoveList on to
ensure that the engine knows the game history after switching boards
and thus handles draw by repetition and by the 50-move rule correctly.
It should, however, also work to turn off this option to speed things
up and reduce network bandwidth, if you don't mind the engine
occasionally failing to see draw possibilities. Unfortunately,
though, with Crafty 18.3 (and probably other versions too) as the
engine, users trying this have experienced Crafty crashes. This looks
to me like a Crafty bug, but I wasn't able to reproduce it, so it
remains a mystery.
Return to WinBoard development and bugfixing
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 11 guests