Variant Fishtest, is a distributed task queue to test new ideas and improvements for chess variant engines through self play. The main instance used for Fairy-Stockfish and multi-variant Stockfish is:

http://www.variantfishtest.org:6543/tests

Developers submit patches with new ideas and improvements for the chess variant, CPU contributors install a fishtest worker on their computers to play some chess games in the background to help the developers testing the patches.

The fishtest worker:

• automatically connects to the server to download: a chess opening book, the cutechess-cli chess game manager and the chess engine sources (for the current master and for the patch with the new idea) that will be compiled according to the type of worker platform.
• starts a batch of games using cutechess-cli.
• uploads the games results on the server.

The fishtest server:

• provides several test templates to generate tests for the patches.
• manages the queue of the tests with customizable priorities.
• computes statistic from the game results sent by the workers.
• updates and publishes the results of ongoing tests.
• stops tests when they are statistically significant and publishes the final tests results.

• Server setup on Ubuntu
• Worker setup on Linux
• Worker setup on Windows
• Running the worker in the Amazon AWS EC2 cloud
• Build cutechess with Qt5 static