I am very glad to inform you that the 4.21 release of Drago is available at http://www.godrago.net .

This version fixes a problem with warning message boxes and adds 3 features requested here or at SL:

full screen mode
timing only for game engines
possibility to insert a node with no move in the game tree

Feedback welcome!

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Drago is freeware

Amazing. I was just wishing yesterday that I could do this in Drago.

Nice.
Thank you

It would be nice if you also add the option to play one engine vs another engine, passing parameters to each one.

Is there a way to define how big the player pictures will be on the screen? I noticed one can add pictures to the players folder, so I added a few that are good enough resolution to be displayed slightly bigger.

@mw42: good timing!

@skan: yes, it is in the list. Not sure how this could be useful, but would be nice.

@kivi: this makes sense. Added to the list.

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Drago is freeware

Hello Gilles.

It's useful for people that likes to compare engines, though I know that the important thing is the game against humans and not against other machines.


I can't get Drago working with the Pachi engine. But that engine works properly with Gogui.


regards

There are uses for engine vs engine:

1) Calibration: There might be a great deal of experience for various levels of engine 1 playing against humans but little experience for engine 2. In which case engine vs engine can be used to calibrate engine 2 (report on how its levels relate to levels of engine 1 and how those relate to playing against humans of known rank).

2) Determining where engines are on the strength/crunch curve: The performance of some engines might still be increasing by a reasonable amount when given more computing power while another might already be at the point of diminishing returns. If you have determiend that level x of engine 1 equals level y of engine 2 you can see if this relationship remains unchanged as crunch power is increased or decreased.

3) Testing changes: I don't mean at the developer level although developers probably do use engine vs engine for various purposes (but capable of rolling their own engine vs engine shell). I mean user options, answering questions like "does adding more space help and how much" or "how much does ponder help", etc.

Perhaps only of use to those of us who want to review engines?

Mike Novack,
I'm not a developer of engines, that's why I didn't thought of that but it's very interesting.
I agree, it could be used to test, train and develop new engines.
We could get a monster like WOPR in WarGames

My intentions were just to benchmark them and watch the patterns they use.

To get result statistics without too much user intervention, a program would have to implement a tournament mode enabling to:

play games with various engines
play games with various settings
repeat games with same settings and engines
gather and format statistics

This is far more that I would implement in Drago and would be better handled with a standalone program. For instance, one of the twogtp programs could be used and extended.

Now, adding an option to select a game engine in place of the user could be implemented in Drago but not as useful as a tournament mode.

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Drago is freeware

This has been tested on xp and w7. I would be interested in if you could get more information by looking at the gtp window and comparing with what happends on the command line.

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Drago is freeware

Could you tell me what test to do or how the get logs, please?

pachi works with Drago if you use the parameter:
Without the parameter pachi doesn't make a move (or very slowly).

Edit: Thanks for the update! Drago is a great program and I use it to play against engines.

OK, Thanks

So good to read Thanks!

Drago comes with the "-d 0" setting for pachi. However, pachi seems to require a lot of memory. For instance, I have to close my browser to make it work on my netbook with 1GB RAM.

For the same reason, pachi pattern files should be used only if a lot of memory is available.

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Drago is freeware

Hi

Though this might not be the proper thread to comment this I'll say I've been testing different engines...
My PC has enough memory to play with Pachi and the extra patterns or any engine I've tried.
The problem is that all of them (in windows) have been compiled with a 32 bit compiler and they crash if you configure them to use more RAM.

Pachi takes a long time to start because it needs all the memory from the beginning.
I've found a program called 4gb_patch that allows you to use a little more memory.
Anyway I've found Fuego more stable and I think they are very similar in strength.
I think Pachi is better in the ranking because they use a computer with a lot of processors.

regards

Go software and GTP are still in a very early stage, if you compare with chess...
I found out, engines often do not respect timing or need special commands. E.g., Gnugo does not respect time settings. It's answer time only depends on the level.

But Fuego 1.1 does, so I always play against it.

Drago, great program.