Racetrack

Racetrack is a cli to play a match between two Tak engines, to see how they play and measure their relative strength.

Racetrack uses the text-based TEI (Tak Engine Interface) to communicate with the engine binaries, very similar to UCI for Chess. The engines communicate with Racetrack by simply sending string commands through stdin/stdout, see the TEI section for more.

TEI

Tak Engine Interface is a protocol based on Universal Chess Interface, intended to be as similar as possible. The key difference are:

• The protocol uses tei everywhere uci would be used, like teiok and teinewgame
• Additionally, teinewgame requires the GUI to send a size parameter. So teinewgame 5 for size 5.
• Move and position notations are obviously different. Portable Tak Notation and Tak Position System are used, respectively.

Engines with TEI support:

• Tiltak
• Taktician
• Takbag
• Ctak (Partial support)

Build

Building the project from source requires the Rust compiler and Cargo (Rust's package manager) installed, both included in the Rust downloads.

The minimum required Rust version is 1.51, released March 25th 2021.

To build and run:

cargo build --release
cargo run --release

This command will automatically fetch and build dependencies. The resulting binaries are written to racetrack/target/release.

Usage

Run racetrack --help to see a full list of options.

To play two games between Tiltak and Taktician, with 60 seconds each for each game:

racetrack --engine path=tiltak --engine path=taktician arg=tei --games 2 --all-engines tc=60

To play two games between Tiltak and Topaz NNUE, with 3 minutes initial time, 3 second increment, and 2 komi:

racetrack --engine path=tiltak --engine path=topaz option.NN=topaz.txt --games 2 --komi 2 --all-engines tc=180+3

To play an engine against itself, use the book-test tournament format:

racetrack -g 1 -s 6 --engine path=tiltak --all-engines tc=30+0.3 --format book-test

Tournament formats

Racetrack supports 3 different tournament formats via the --format argument:

• Round robin (default): Every engine plays every other engine with both colors. Each opening is played with both colors by every pair of engines.
• Book test: Same as round robin, but the engines also plays each opening against themselves. This tournament format can be played with only one engine.
• Gauntlet: Requires 3 or more engines. The first engine is the "champion", and takes turns playing the other engines. The challengers never play each other.

Notes for engine developers

• Use the --log argument to print a full log of TEI communications for debugging.
• Racetrack uses two non-standard rules: Games are adjudicated as drawn if the exact same position is reached three times (Identical to the rule in chess), and if a game's length exceeds 100 moves.
• If an engine plays an illegal move or crashes, the game is ruled as a loss, but the tournament continues.
• Engines are not ordinarily re-started between games, except for after crashes.
• stderr output from the engines is captured, and echoed to Racetrack's stderr. If you're getting weird output, that's probably why.