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Subject: Re: Chessmaster 8000 Updated FAQ. My dime

Author: Mike S.

Date: 08:52:56 09/10/00

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On September 10, 2000 at 06:55:49, Aaron Tay wrote:

>(...) And of course on one computer you get the
>"ponder problem" surfaceing.

Yes, it would be useful to have a ponder switch outside of the personality
profile. I'd also like to have the hash size setting under a simple menu item
better, rather than to have to create various personalities for such standard
settings. This is uncomfortable.

But the "ponder problem" itself remains to be one of the worst, not only for
Chessmaster. Many computer chess newbies (presumably 99% of them) are not aware
of 1. pondering itself, and 2. that the ressources may not be shared equally,
when a match on one computer is being played.

This could be avoided, if the program's docs would inform the customers much
more clearly about this issue. The companies are responsible themselves, if
non-informed users produce nonsense results from unequal comparison. You can't
expect every customer to be a computer chess expert. Of course, programs which
grab most of a computer's resources, have an advantage from this situation.

Other ideas would be different "operation modi", which would for example disable
the permanent brain automatically in the mode "prog-prog match by task switching
on one computer" - or a short automatic performance check sometimes in between,
which would be compared with a benchmark result the user once had to generate
under "clean" conditions before. There could be a warning, if the performance
would be <95% of that benchmark, and info for the user that he should do
something about that with detailed advice could be given.

But it won't be done, and next year we could discuss the very same problem
again. If somebody wants to discuss it anyway. I don't think so.

Regards,
M.Scheidl



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