Second '21 Special: Below 1850 tournament

[kalatov]

In fact someone has done it already (I've already written a shim so that Novags appear as Xboard engines).
https://github.com/ShailChoksi/lichess-bot
Looks like I just need a bot account on Lichess and the Super Nova will be ready!

Phil

[paulwise3]

Hi Phil,
Now that would be interesting!
Let us know if you need an opponent to test it.
But how do we chat then? Maybe via a lichess messaging page?
Paul

[blaubaer]

Thanks Paul,
for your excellent tournament organisation!
Thumb up Regards Michael

[paulwise3]

Thanks Paul,
for your excellent tournament organisation!
Thumb up Regards Michael

Hi Michael,
I hoped that your Superconny would show some spectacular attacking games, but alas...
Jürgen and I opt for a next tournament Under 1925 elo (somewhere october/november/december), I hope you have a comp that can compete for the first place then.
Or do you have ideas for a special Halloween tournament?

Chess comps rule regards,
Paul

[kalatov]

Hi Phil,
Now that would be interesting!
Let us know if you need an opponent to test it.
But how do we chat then? Maybe via a lichess messaging page?
Paul

Thanks Paul. Well I think I've got it basically working. I don't know how robust my code is yet, so yes some testing would be great. The account on Lichess is Novagcc (you have to have a special bot account to use a computer on Lichess 'legally', or at least in an automated fashion as I am doing). I guess I could leave it online if you fancy having a go. It's connected to the Super Nova, which is set to 30s a move.

As I say, I don't know how stable it is, I've played a few games both as black and white, just unrated casual, so if it stops responding at any time best to assume the code crashed. Also I don't know whether you can just leave a bot sat there logged in without it timing out. If that turns out to be a problem then perhaps we can arrange a time to meet on line to try it.

Incidentally, I found out that I can be logged in the website as the bot account and use the chat function at the same time it's playing, so that works too.

Cheers

Phil

[kalatov]

And if anyone else here fancies giving this a try, feel free, I'll leave it online for a day or two. On lichess, find Novagcc and challenge it to a casual unrated game, choose black or white to play and see how it goes. As mentioned, you'll be playing a Novag Super Nova set on 30s a move, so obviously the speed of play will be as you would expect from that set up. I'd be grateful for feedback for how well it works. I guess you could use it as an opportunity to test out possible machines you might enter for an under 1920 tournament later in the year!

Phil

[esinger]

Btw: I hope you have collected all the game pgn's again?
I would like to receive them again

Paul

Hi Paul,

Yes, I collected all the games and I just sent you the PGN file with them all.

Thank you for the tournament!
Eric

[paulwise3]

Hi Paul,

Yes, I collected all the games and I just sent you the PGN file with them all.

Thank you for the tournament!
Eric

Great!
And you're welcome
Paul

[ricard60]

And if anyone else here fancies giving this a try, feel free, I'll leave it online for a day or two. On lichess, find Novagcc and challenge it to a casual unrated game, choose black or white to play and see how it goes. As mentioned, you'll be playing a Novag Super Nova set on 30s a move, so obviously the speed of play will be as you would expect from that set up. I'd be grateful for feedback for how well it works. I guess you could use it as an opportunity to test out possible machines you might enter for an under 1920 tournament later in the year!

Phil

Hi Phil,
It is still online?. I am trying , found the Novagcc but after selecting what appears on the screen is circle rounding and rounding and shows a text that says waiting for the opponent.

puzzle regards,
Ricardo

[kalatov]

Hi Phil,
It is still online?. I am trying , found the Novagcc but after selecting what appears on the screen is circle rounding and rounding and shows a text that says waiting for the opponent.

puzzle regards,
Ricardo

Thanks for trying Ricardo. It seems that either the lichess command line client (which uses my Novag/Xboard code as an 'engine'), or my code becomes unresponsive after some time waiting for a challenge, I'll have to investigate why, but for now I have killed the processes and restarted it, so if you see this in the near future, hopefully it'll still be OK. You need to challenge it a casual correspondence, you can choose to be white or black. I was playing my Citrine against it last night and it mainly worked, but the process crashed when the Super Nova, I think, probably resigned, but I've improved the logging of my code to try and catch what happened again, so any testing/feedback gratefully received. Interestingly, the Xboard protocol the lichess client uses when talking to an engine isn't exactly the same as Xboard actually uses when I'm playing computers via the real Xboard app!

All the best
Phil

[kalatov]

I just saw you connect Ricardo, and then the bot reported that it was aborting the game due to lack of activity. Did you play a move?

Phil

[kalatov]

Thanks Franz and Ricardo for giving it a go. I think I've found a bug in the Super Nova's comms code. When the SN declares the end of a game, e.g. a mate, or resigns, it displays the result on its own screen, but stops responding to commands via the serial line, until New Game is pressed on the computer, which confuses Lichess. More experimentation needed.

[kalatov]

After more investigation I'm thinking this is a problem with lichess-bot's implementation of the Xboard protocol. I'm not the only one struggling with it: https://github.com/ShailChoksi/lichess-bot/issues/131 (last comment Sept 2020). My code works fine with the real Xboard talking to Novags.

I'll stop spamming this thread, and perhaps start a separate one at some point in case there are any other people interested in getting old CCs interacting directly with Lichess. If anyone here has experience of putting any of their machines directly online please let me know. I see Xboard can act as an ICS client so it would be straightforward to do that one I think, but I haven't been on ICS (same as fics.org?) for a long time, and of course we don't use it here for the tournaments, so not really of use.

Phil

[paulwise3]

After more investigation I'm thinking this is a problem with lichess-bot's implementation of the Xboard protocol. I'm not the only one struggling with it: https://github.com/ShailChoksi/lichess-bot/issues/131 (last comment Sept 2020). My code works fine with the real Xboard talking to Novags.

I'll stop spamming this thread, and perhaps start a separate one at some point in case there are any other people interested in getting old CCs interacting directly with Lichess. If anyone here has experience of putting any of their machines directly online please let me know. I see Xboard can act as an ICS client so it would be straightforward to do that one I think, but I haven't been on ICS (same as fics.org?) for a long time, and of course we don't use it here for the tournaments, so not really of use.

Phil

Hi Phil,
Good idea to start a new thread for this, I am sure there is more interest for this.
But let us know if and/or when we can try playing against your Novagcc!
Regards, Paul

[kalatov]

Whilst doing some testing I got the Super Nova to play my Star Diamond, as I was fairly sure the SD would get the SN on the ropes reasonably quickly. I just share it here as I thought people might like the Super Nova's last ditch trap to save the game with a stalemate. Obviously the SD didn't fall for it, but I bet I would have done!

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Bg5 e6 7. f4 Be7 8. Qf3 Qc7 9. O-O-O Nbd7 10. g4 b5 11. Bxf6 Nxf6 12. Bg2 Bb7 13. g5 Nd7 14. Rd3 Nc5 15. Re3 b4 16. Nce2 Rc8 17. Kb1 e5 18. fxe5 dxe5 19. g6 hxg6 20. Nb3 Nxb3 21. axb3 Qxc2+ 22. Ka1 Rc5 23. Nc1 Rxh2 24. Rg1 Rxg2 25. Qxg2 Qxg2 26. Rxg2 Rxc1+ 27. Ka2 Bh4 28. Rg4 g5 29. Rf3 Re1 30. Rf5 f6 31. Rxh4 gxh4 32. Rxf6 Ra1+ [White resigned]