The ringmaster

The ringmaster is a command line program which arranges games between GTP engines and keeps track of the results. See Command line below for details of the command line options.

The ringmaster takes its instructions from a single configuration file known as the control file. Each control file defines a competition; the output files for that competition are written to the directory containing the control file.

A competition can take place over multiple invocations of the ringmaster (runs). For example, a run can be halted from the console, in which case starting the ringmaster again will make it continue from where it left off.

The ringmaster supports a number of different competition types. Currently, three types of competition are supported:

Playoffs
In a playoff, the ringmaster plays many games between fixed player pairings (matchups), to compare their strengths.
Tuning events

In a tuning event, the ringmaster runs an algorithm for adjusting player parameters to try to find the values which give strongest play.

There are two types of tuning event, Monte Carlo and cross-entropy.