I set up a 13 engine chess tournament on Scid Vs PC

Each played each other twice, time limit is 5min + 5inc, played on a computer with i5 3570K CPU 4.2Ghz.

The engines include Stockfish, Komodo, Houdini, Deep Rybka and a couple of "joke" engines Roce and Trex (who likes to move the queen out second move).

Interestingly Komodo has a perfect win record and Trex has a perfect lose record.

Note a small number of games didn't play.

I think if you were to play many more games, you'd see Stockfish outperform Komodo by a small amount.

It pains me to see you call Roce a "joke" engine. Yeah, it's only rated in the 1800s, but it's rock solid as far as bugs go. That's no small feat in the chess engine programming world.

It's a bit disturbing to see the Scid vs. PC GUI fail to play some of the games in the tournament. I guess the tournament feature in that GUI isn't quite ready for prime time.

Just to add, no opening book was used.

What I meant was it's a "joke" if you compare it to the top engines.

I've now matched, just for one game, the two top engines from that tournament Stockfish and Komodo to play each other but given 5 mins each per move. Might be a long game but hopefully should be a game of very high standard moves.

So I set up an engine game, 5 min per move, yet one side somehow ran out of time?

I'd say that you need to find another GUI for your tournaments.

That sometimes happens to me on Scid if my laptop goes to sleep.

@OP, to be honest, until you created this thread, I wasn't aware that Scid vs. PC has an engine tournament feature. So, after your first post, I started a very small tournament in that GUI with the only 4 engines I had installed...and some of the games didn't play, just as you experienced. It was at that point that I concluded I hadn't been missing anything, and that I'd stick with my usual GUI for engine tournaments.

What GUI do you usually use?

For engine tournaments, I use Arena. I did use ChessGUI (by Matthias Gemuh) for a while, but I keep going back to Arena. I guess you could also use Lucas Chess if all of the engines are UCI.

(For database work, I use Scid vs. PC. For analysis of a game, I might use Arena or Lucas Chess, or the main online competitor to Chess.com, of which we're not supposed to mention. Li... <cough> <cough>)

One thing that's fun to do is to set a strong engine to play a very weak engine multiple bullet games to see how quickly it can get checkmate.

I've started another tournament this time with six strong engines- houdini, stockfish, komodo, ethereal, deep shredder and fire. To play each other twice 5min + 5inc games. Will post results.

btw does anyone think there is enough interest here in chess engines/computers to make it worth having a subforum for discussing them?

dfhb

That would be nice, but there's probably not enough interest to justify it. I think it's been suggested before, but so far, nothing. I usually try to put these items under Chess Books & Equipment.

On Scid Vs PC some engines lose by running out of time- even if they are not actually losing and when they have a little bonus time per move. I would have thought the GUI would step in at 1 second (or whatever the lowest time increment is) and force the engine to move whatever it currently thinks is best.

If anyone is interested I emailed the developer this and this was his reply:

The last engine tournament I setup (which worked out) was 20 engines playing against each other (380 games!) 1 minute bullet games.

Observations- Stockfish has came out on top, and so far in all my games/tournaments only Komodo has been able to beat it.

Also in this tournament earlier versions of Houdini have performed better than the most recent one. Or maybe the Houdini engines were designed for longer games rather than bullet or blitz?

(to view full size right-click image and click "view image")

Can anyone explain in layman terms why some engines have slight varations with a suffix of popcnt, nopopcnt, pext, bmi2?

Scid Vs PC crashes for me if I try to use an engine that's either pext or bmi2.

Those describe some instruction sets that different CPUs may or may not support. bmi2 should be fastest for modern Intel processors. You could benchmark them to see which version runs fastest on your computer and use that.

Also I never saw anyone using Scid vs PC to run engine tournaments. You should probably inform yourself better about the subject (talkchess might be a good website) to get a proper setup. Most chess engines can play bullet easily, its just that Scid vs PC is not really suitable for this task as it appears.