Antichess Tournament

Handout F6

Quick links:

• antichess.mit.edu
• E-mail Antichess TAs with questions (6.170-ac-tas@mit.edu).
• RSVP

Contents:

• Antichess Final Tournament
• Seeding Tournament
• Game Specifics
• Multicore Access Instructions

Antichess Final Tournament

The Antichess Tournament will be held on Tuesday, December 11 at 7:00pm in the Kiva room (32-G449) of the Stata Center. It will last about three hours. Pizza will be served. Please RSVP by 10pm on Sunday, December 9 by adding your name to the wiki at: http://scripts.mit.edu/~jwkim/antichess-tournament. You are welcome to bring guests—please note the number of guests on the wiki.

The Antichess Tournament will be a double-elimination tournament playing both prior and post amendment rules ("6170-fall-2007" and "6170-fall-2007-powerups"). During the double-elimination tournament, the winners bracket will play with powerups and the losers bracket will play with regular Antichess.

The team with the higher tournament seed (see below) will choose its color and will win draws. (A draw occurs when players repeat the same moves three times in a row or when 50 moves occur without a piece being taken or a pawn moved.)

If the final matches require the same teams to play each other more than once, the teams' colors will switch for the second game. However, the team with the higher tournament seed will still win if there is a draw. If the match is tied after the second game, a third tie-breaker game will be played. The team with the higher tournament seed will have the option to either choose its color or win draws. The other team will choose the remaining option. The winner of the final match will be crowned the 6.170 Antichess AI Grand Master and will be awarded a modest prize at the awards ceremony during lecture.

Seeding Tournament

Before the final tournament, the staff will hold a seeding tournament. The seeding tournament will probably consist of playing each program against one another both as white and black and then awarding each team 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, and 0 points for a loss. It will play both prior and post amendment games, therefore each pair will play a total of 4 games. However, the staff reserves the right to modify these rules due to technical or temporal issues.

The seeding tournament will be used for determining the initial bracket for the final tournament as well as breaking ties in the final tournament. Depending on the number of participants, some high-seeded teams may receive byes in the opening round.

Game Specifics

During each game, each player will be given 4 minutes of time to play, subject to modification due to necessity on day of game.

IMPORTANT: In the event that one player makes an invalid move, that player forfeits the match.

Multicore Access Instructions

We have set up 2 multi-core machines sponsored by Sun Microsystems this term for use in testing your Antichess projects.

Some points:

1. These are Sun-Fire-T2000 machines with 8 x 1.2 GHz cores each with 4 CoolThread technology to get 32 virtual CPUs and 16GB RAM. This means the OS is expected to run 32 threads simultaneously.
2. We will give 2GB of heap space to your program.
3. You have no direct access to these machines, but may test your programs using our Antichess.net scrimmage server antichess.mit.edu:
   
   
   • Click on the link to "Play Antichess."
   • In "Setup a New Game", choose your JAR file that is uploaded on the web as an "AI Player". You may specify multiple JARs you uploaded to be played through this scrimmage server.
   • Check the box that says "Run remotely on official hardware".
   • Be patient and wait for the progress bar to fully complete.
   • If you chose both players to run on official hardware, then you will see "Casual Observer:Running official game on sun32-sun32" and that means that your game is being played on Sun's multicores. (If only one player is chosen to run on official hardware, then no feedback will be displayed.)


4. You cannot run other programs on the multicore machines we have provided other than the AiPlayerFactory interface that you are required to implement for the scrimmage server functionality. However, you may choose to make use of the Chat infrastructure to do some clever program tweaking or debugging output.
5. You may, however, upload more than one version of your player JAR files, for example, one with many threads spawned and one with only one thread spawned, in order to test your program's artificial intelligence in order to meet our requirements.