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Subject: Re: I've just finished my Winboard Tournament Manager

Author: Adrien Regimbald

Date: 19:12:36 06/20/00

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Hello,

>This is cool. We can run tourneys without wait to finish each game to do other.


This can already be done, can't it?

use the -mg <number of games> flag to have a match between two engines.
you can use the -sgf <PGN output file> flag to save a PGN file of the games.
you can even use -lgf to load a PGN game file for the engines to start from, and
-lpf to load a position for them to start from.

I just did a quick 4 game lightning tourney between Faile 1.4 and Faile 0.6 like
this:

D:\WinBoard>winboard -cp -tc 1 -inc 0 -mg 4 -sgf "tourneys\test.pgn" -fd "d:\fai
le1x" -fcp "faile.exe" -sd "d:\faile06" -scp "faile06.exe -xboard"

If you have problems with command line limitations, they can be easily worked
around by using a batch/script file.  You can even easily do a round-robin
tourney by doing multiple two-game matches between the two participants.

Heck - with a little thought, one could easily make a perl script to run
sophisticated tourneys - the possibilities are really endless.


It'd be really nice to have a program that ran winboard engine tourneys (Fritz
is great for this .. but urgh .. stupid winboard adapter.. :P), generated
reports, etc.  However, I don't have MS Access, and I'm not going to purchase it
just for this.


Some notes on programming aspects of this winboard tournament manager:
- I don't really think it is necessary to use any database facilities for the
settings on each program.  What would be so bad about simply asking the user to
enter the necessary commandline for each program they wish to put in the
tournament?  I don't think many people would mind, considering the benefits of
having an automated tournament manager.  I also wonder why you have to use
access?  For most of the MSVC++ database involved application programs I worked
on, it was possible to simply use built in databasing features from MSVC++ and
most of these applications needed much more sophistication from the database
than simply reading program settings..  I would imagine MS VB has something like
this as well?
- I am not too familiar with MS VB, but I know that MSVC++ allows you to choose
between linking "extra" libraries statically, or dynamically.  If you choose
static, the program size grows a bit, but it will run on any win9x machine.  The
DLL option makes for a smaller resulting binary, but isn't as likely to be
usable on every machine.  I would imagine that MS VB would have some sort of
option like this?

You'll have to excuse me if I'm off on the MSVC++ vs. MS VB comparisons .. it's
just that they are in the same "family" of development applications, and I
figured that their feature sets would be similar, just that MSVC++ is targeted
at C/C++ development..  then again, what am I talking about?  M$ following any
sort of a standard, even their own? HA! :P  Likely story :P


Regards,
Adrien.



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