Author: Richard A. Fowell (fowell@netcom.com)
Date: 11:07:32 11/26/98
Go up one level in this thread
On November 25, 1998 at 12:32:07, Geo Disher wrote:
>On November 24, 1998 at 09:40:07, Georg Langrath wrote:
>
>>I feel a little bit sorry for chessprogrammers. They shall always find new
>>features in order to convince us that we need to buy their new product. But
>>what more do we want in features? Any ideas?
>>
>>Georg
>
>I would like to see a program that allows us to analyze a possition for period
>of time then stop the analysis then allow us to return to that same exact point
>in the analysis at a later time.
Yes!!! There are many uses for this feature,
and I think there should be both a
"save program state" and a
"autosave program state" command.
Robort Hyatt's recent power outage disaster could have been averted if
Crafty had an "autosave program state" feature.
Robert was running a Deep Blue - Kasparov position on Crafty for a week or
so, and then a power outage lost everything, so he gave up on it. If
Crafty had the feature of saving a "restartable state" of search tree,
hash tables, tree, etc., then he could have resumed from the last such point.
Better yet,if this feature were combined with an "autosave" of the state at a
user-specified frequency (once per day? once per hour?) there wouldn't be any
hassle in doing this.
For really long searches (Nolot problems, etc), this sort of "autosave"
feature would be excellent - here are some of its many uses.
- (1) protects against power outages
- (2) protects against program/system crashes
- (3) allows you to suspend analysis to use chess program
for other things, then resume.
- (3) allows you to suspend analysis to use your computer
for other things, then resume.
- (4) User support/beta test tool - lets you email "autosave" file to the
author in case of strange behaviour
- (5) Lets you "pass on" your problem from your old computer to your new
computer when you upgrade your computer.
- (6) Would let you "pass on" your problem to another person,
if you lose interest.
- (7) Would let you run a problem "24 hours a day" but exchanging it with
a colleague on the other side of the Earth (you run it during your
"night time", then ftp it to them, and they run it during your
"night time". (okay, I'm stretching a bit).
Richard A. Fowell
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