1rst INTERNATIONAL DRAUGHTS ENGINES TOURNAMENT

[Joost Buijs]

International Draughts 10x10 is obviously a game that draws very easily, however this doesn't mean that the game is always a draw theoretically.

The only way to overcome this problem without changing the rules of the game is to use shorter thinking times, this would express the difference between various engines more clearly. Instead of letting the engines think 10 minutes for a game you could make it 1 minute for a game or even less, but that would mean tournaments have to be automated with very strict time control.

Personally I don't understand why computer Draughts tournaments are still played by hand, automating it would make it a lot easier and faster to play tournaments like this. Also the errors that often appear when operating an engine by hand will disappear when everything is automated. The problem of course is standardization, some very old engines can only be operated by hand, others use DXP, and a few use the "UCI clone" HUB.

Maybe the computer Draughts community is too small to justify spending effort in building something like TCEC for Draughts, but it would surely attract new people to this hobby, just my 2 cents.

Unfortunately, it's not quite as you would like and think about draughts engines. It all depends on the programmer, his goal and intention to use the draughts program. They've posted about it on the forum before Jelle Wiersma and Jan Jaap van Horssen. Not everyone will make a program to play well for 1 minute or less. A lot of people have written a program or write, for example, for tournaments at the Olympics. And in the Olympics there is no 1 minute to play. As for the website, you can write it all and pay for a private server. But I don't know if it's worth it because very few programs support HUB (because many programmers are not interested in it).

To be honest I don't know much about the computer Draughts community, but the thing that really strikes me is the complete lack of activity. Playing games with shorter time control is just an idea to break the endless series of draws, it is not very difficult for for a programmer to add sub second time control, probably most programs can do this already. To automate a tournament you don't need HUB, you can do this with DXP as well, maybe it needs a little extension but that wouldn't be too complicated. As for the server, that wouldn't cost much, nowadays most people already have a fast internet connection, the only thing you'll need is a small computer, and maybe you want to get a dedicated domain name, but as you already said, it probably isn't worth the effort.

[pontel]

Friend Sidik,

Congratulations on the initiative!

A big hug for you!!!

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

International Draughts 10x10 is obviously a game that draws very easily, however this doesn't mean that the game is always a draw theoretically.

The only way to overcome this problem without changing the rules of the game is to use shorter thinking times, this would express the difference between various engines more clearly. Instead of letting the engines think 10 minutes for a game you could make it 1 minute for a game or even less, but that would mean tournaments have to be automated with very strict time control.

Personally I don't understand why computer Draughts tournaments are still played by hand, automating it would make it a lot easier and faster to play tournaments like this. Also the errors that often appear when operating an engine by hand will disappear when everything is automated. The problem of course is standardization, some very old engines can only be operated by hand, others use DXP, and a few use the "UCI clone" HUB.

Maybe the computer Draughts community is too small to justify spending effort in building something like TCEC for Draughts, but it would surely attract new people to this hobby, just my 2 cents.

It wouldn't be a problem to make a page like this up to a certain point. The problem would be what application to manage the entire tournament during the game of engines. You need to write something like Ed while playing with the HUB.Here many people (programmers) would have to help with this.

[Joost Buijs]

It wouldn't be a problem to make a page like this up to a certain point. The problem would be what application to manage the entire tournament during the game of engines. You need to write something like Ed while playing with the HUB.Here many people (programmers) would have to help with this.

All together it's not very difficult to write a tournament manager, and to make a website for it. If you want to do something like this it has to be perfect in the sense that it recognizes all the drawing rules, 3 times repetition, 25 move rule and more. It also has to take the latency (transmission time) into account when sending moves over the internet.

A lot of software to do this has already been written for Chess, most of it is in the public domain, but you'll have to adapt it to Draughts which can easily take a few weeks of work before the bugs that you will inevitably get are ironed out.

Another option could be to use LiDraughts (a fork of LiChess), it probably has a good tournament manager, so the only thing that has to be done is to write a module to enable engines to interface with it. I think Bert is currently looking at this.

For me it has very low priority, currently my engine only understands DXP server mode, in less than one hour I could add HUB by taking my UCI module and making a few changes to it, but I never felt the need to do so.

[Sidiki]

Hi all

The first INTERNATIONAL DRAUGHTS ENGINES TOURNAMENT 2023 finished today.

Congratulations again to all the programmers without forget one of them.

The tournament was won by ARES, Congratulations to Joost.

The 2nd place was tooks by IDames of Ngandeu Boris
And the 3rd place by Damage and Kingsrow.

Congratulations and Thanks again for all your great programs.

https://results.fmjd.org/tournaments/20 ... gs&22.html

The next tournament will begin soon with more updates.

Friendly, Sidiki.

[BertTuyt]

Sidiki, again thanks for organizing.

I have great respect for those who organize these events, as it is rather time consuming.
Maybe we can automate play between a large number of engines in the future.
But as some already posted here, this is not going to happen soon.

Bert

[Sidiki]

Hi Bert,

Thanks again. It's true, these tournaments are time consuming.
Things would be easy also if all the engine was able to be server and client in dxp mode, also having save game mode.

I'm trying to do something as TCEC.
I received Edeon today, and it permit with his GUI to spare two engine.

It can do our job, things will be speed.

The next tournament will begin soon.

Friendly, Sidiki.

[Joost Buijs]

Hi Sidiki,

Thanks for organizing and running this tournament! I can only imagine the quantity of work involved to run most of the games by hand.

Tournaments like these (double round robin) give a good impression about the playing strength of each engine, of course there always is some luck involved.

When I have some time (and feel like it) I will add DXP client mode to my engine, hopefully this will make it somewhat easier to use the engine in a tournament. I never cared to implement things like this because it is not very important for development of the engine itself.

B.t.w. can you give some information about the hardware you used: processor, number of cores, amount of RAM and the hard-drive (or SSD) used for the EGDB? Also the settings for each engine would be useful information, thanks.

Joost

[Sidiki]

Hi Joost,

Thanks again,
Finally i got an occasion PC with a gamer FRIEND.

PC Portable HP Victus Gaming 15-fa0071nf - 15,6"FHD - Intel Core i7-12650H - RAM 32Go - Stockage 512Go SSD - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4Go VRAM - Blue - Windows 11 - AZERTY

Ares : opening book, 6 EGDB
Damage : opening book, 7 EGDB
Dragon : tournament opening book, 7 EGDB
Flits : opening book, 6 EGDB
GWD : no opening book, 7 EGDB
Horizon : no opening book, no EGDB
IDames : opening book 7 plies, EGDB
Kingsrow : opening book (best moves), 8EGDB
Maximus : opening book, 6 EGDB
Mobydam : opening book, 6EGDB
Scan : opening book, 6 EGDB
Truus : opening book, 6 EGDB

I hope that this can help.

Friendly, Sidiki.

[Joost Buijs]

Hi Joost,

Thanks again,
Finally i got an occasion PC with a gamer FRIEND.

PC Portable HP Victus Gaming 15-fa0071nf - 15,6"FHD - Intel Core i7-12650H - RAM 32Go - Stockage 512Go SSD - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4Go VRAM - Blue - Windows 11 - AZERTY

Ares : opening book, 6 EGDB
Damage : opening book, 7 EGDB
Dragon : tournament opening book, 7 EGDB
Flits : opening book, 6 EGDB
GWD : no opening book, 7 EGDB
Horizon : no opening book, no EGDB
IDames : opening book 7 plies, EGDB
Kingsrow : opening book (best moves), 8EGDB
Maximus : opening book, 6 EGDB
Mobydam : opening book, 6EGDB
Scan : opening book, 6 EGDB
Truus : opening book, 6 EGDB

I hope that this can help.

Friendly, Sidiki.

Hi Sidiki,

Thanks for the info!

Joost

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

Hi Bert,

Thanks again. It's true, these tournaments are time consuming.
Things would be easy also if all the engine was able to be server and client in dxp mode, also having save game mode.

I'm trying to do something as TCEC.
I received Edeon today, and it permit with his GUI to spare two engine.

It can do our job, things will be speed.

The next tournament will begin soon.

Friendly, Sidiki.

I don't think Edeon will help here either. He only has games using DXP. You can try the Cute Chess app. I just don't know if she's good for draughts.

[Sidiki]

Hi Joost,

Thanks again,
Finally i got an occasion PC with a gamer FRIEND.

PC Portable HP Victus Gaming 15-fa0071nf - 15,6"FHD - Intel Core i7-12650H - RAM 32Go - Stockage 512Go SSD - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4Go VRAM - Blue - Windows 11 - AZERTY

Ares : opening book, 6 EGDB
Damage : opening book, 7 EGDB
Dragon : tournament opening book, 7 EGDB
Flits : opening book, 6 EGDB
GWD : no opening book, 7 EGDB
Horizon : no opening book, no EGDB
IDames : opening book 7 plies, EGDB
Kingsrow : opening book (best moves), 8EGDB
Maximus : opening book, 6 EGDB
Mobydam : opening book, 6EGDB
Scan : opening book, 6 EGDB
Truus : opening book, 6 EGDB

I hope that this can help.

Friendly, Sidiki.

Hi Sidiki,

Thanks for the info!

Joost

Hi Joost,

OK, thanks.
We are together.

Friendly, Sidiki.

[Joost Buijs]

Hi Sidiki,

Some things are still not clear to me, did you use two computers for the tournament or just one? And what are the number of threads the engine were using? And were they using pondering or not?

If you were running this tournament on just 1 computer you should have disabled pondering for all engines, otherwise the results of this tournament would be messed up completely.

In the mean time Ares improved quite a bit, at least it is stronger than the version that played in your last tournament, let me know when there will be the next tournament, then I'll make sure that you will get the latest version.

Joost