UEC cup first two rounds

Well, everything that could go wrong went wrong in the first round. After a perfect test last night, the program just would not connect. Hungabee looked fine, our backup system in Japan looked fine, but no matter what Kazuki tried, we did not manage to connect any of our programs to the tournament server. We lost the first game against Hiroshi Yamashita's Aya without playing a single move.

Our frantic efforts continued as the deadline for starting the second game crawled nearer. Kazuki suspected a problem on his laptop, so we tried to move things over to mine. Copy files for the front end program and connection scripts over to my machine. Compile fails. Copy the missing library. Compile works. Ruby script fails to run. My version of Ruby is too new for the script. Can we install an older Ruby? Time is ticking.

Finally I say "let's play the game on the laptop". So round 2, instead of 2048 cores we use 2. We win the game. Kazuki finds the problem - it is his ethernet cable. Its transmission drops so many packets that the program which links the large machine to the laptop thinks it is disconnected. We plug in a different cable. Everything works.

So, for round 3 we are finally set to use Hungabee. Keeping my fingers crossed. This is way too much excitement.

The tournament so far:
The strong Korean program Dol Baram did not show up. There are 16 programs in the competition. The top contenders Crazy Stone (last year's winner), Zen (2nd), Aya (3rd) and Nomitan (6th) all have two wins. Hirabot is the only other undefeated program.

Round 3 will start in 10 minutes.
Pairings (white player first):
Mc_ark - Crazy Stone
Qinoa Igo - Storm
Ballade - Mayo Igo
Aya - Katsunari
Nomitan - Caren
MP-Fuego - Milago
Leafquest - Gogataki
Zen - Hirabot

Why won't it connect to the server? (Photo courtesy of Remi Coulom)