Running a match without CI

None of the four tools needs GitHub Actions. They read pgn files, or in book-slice’s case a few numbers, so they work on games played anywhere: on one machine, or on a few machines that each play part of a match. pip install mache gives the command names. fastchess and an opening book are yours to provide. In a clone of this repository, bin/book_table.sh fetch 8moves_v3 . downloads one of the two books the actions use and checks it against its recorded hash.

Each machine plays a shard. book-slice says which opening a shard starts at, so that no two shards play the same one. Every shard asks with the same numbers and its own --shard:

openings=$(grep -c '^\[Event ' 8moves_v3.pgn)
start=$(book-slice --openings "$openings" --pairs 100 --shards 2 --shard 0 --seed 7)

Then fastchess plays the shard. -repeat pairs the games as match-estimate expects. -rounds is the number of pairs and has to match --pairs above. nodes=true is what the report’s table of clocks and nodes counts moves by, and timeleft=true gives its last column. Without them the table reads as zeros.

fastchess -engine name=new cmd=./new -engine name=old cmd=./old \
  -each proto=uci tc=10+0.1 \
  -openings file=8moves_v3.pgn format=pgn order=sequential start="$start" \
  -rounds 100 -repeat -concurrency 2 \
  -pgnout file=games.pgn nodes=true timeleft=true

fastchess adds to a games.pgn that is already there, so start each shard in an empty directory. A shard played twice into one file would be counted twice.

With each shard’s games in a directory of its own, one command pools them. The directory names become the rows of the shard table:

match-estimate shard-0/games.pgn shard-1/games.pgn \
  --candidate new --baseline old --tc 10+0.1

--elo0, --elo1, --prior-pairs and --model run the sequential test here the same way they do in a workflow. A test played in several batches passes --batches and --batch to book-slice as well, so that a later batch does not replay an earlier one’s openings.