Hi Achim, hello dear all,

thanks for the feedback; indeed not a common feature for chess computers (that's an understatement ).

Maybe worth sharing my intention: yes, many UCI engines enable "UCI_LimitStrength" coupled with "UCI_Elo" options. Without including versions or close clones, I currently have 37 of these in my engines collection.
Large data is publicly available about peak strength / ranking of engines under various conditions, but close to none about the consistency of Elo-levels.

Few engines benefit from a good reputation in this area (e.g. Shredder and HIARCS); is this deserved? and what about the others? I want to run some tests; even if, maybe, this will only scratch the surface.

I selected 9 engines I consider worth testing: Arasan, Chiron, HIARCS, Honey X5i, Komodo Dragon, Maia, Shredder, Stockfish and Wasp.

I decided to use the latest version (excluding dev ones) I have for each, resulting in: Arasan 24.2.1, Chiron 5, HIARCS 15.3.1, Komodo Dragon 3.3, Shredder 13, Stockfish 16.1 and Wasp 7.0 - except for:

- Honey X5i by Michael Byrne which is the first (AFAIK) Stockfish derivative including adaptative level feature (dates from 2019); which is the reason why I saved this engine in my collection,
- Maia the famous human-games-based nets for Leela using a specific implementation of my own (no instant play nor depth-based, compliant with clock setting).

As a standard the Elo-levels are from 1000 to 2000 step 200, where available, thus 6 levels for each engine. Restrictions are Wasp (min 1500, so using 3 levels 1600, 1800, 2000) and Maia (nets ranging from 1100 to 1900, so using 4 levels 1200, 1400, 1600, 1800).

To complete the picture, I add two plus one chess computers:
- Nigel Short (Milano v2) with 5 Elo Active levels (min is 1200, max is 2000)
- the King Performance with 3 easy levels (0, 4, 7 thus 1000, 1600, 1950)
- Fidelity Excellence 3Mhz without Elo levels of course, as a reference for later EloStat normalization. Using level 4 (30 secs/move on average) it scores 1798 according to the current Wiki-Elo-List for active chess.

The Swiss tournament starts with the 56 participants sorted by theoretical strength; then inside each Elo ranking (1000, 1200, 1600...) the position is random for round 1. Two games played each round (alternate colors), pace set to avg 30s/move or equivalent.

6 rounds (336 games) should be required as a minimum; I would be more than happy if I can reach 10 rounds thus 20 games per participant (and 560 total games). Let's see...

Maybe after that I shall select a couple of best engines and run Spacious Mind's tests for confirmation of consistency?

I apologize for the lengthy post...
MfG
Eric