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Subject: Re: What happened to the final CM8K patch? (NT)

Author: Dieter Buerssner

Date: 17:24:33 05/21/01

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On May 21, 2001 at 14:06:37, John Merlino wrote:

>On May 21, 2001 at 12:06:51, Carlos Pesce wrote:
>
>>Hi, John!
>>In the new patch, CM Gui will send "hard" and "easy" to the winboard engines?
>>I think that its much important..maybe you can implement it.

>The current state of the patch does not do this, as Chessmaster assumes that the
>engine's default operation is what the user wants. If another version of the
>patch is required (in other words, if any bugs are found in the current
>version), then this might be added.
>
>However, you can send any command that you want to any imported engine via the
>Engine Monitor windows.

First, I want to say that I do not own CM 8000. However I have seen quite a few
log files of my engine running under thi GUI as a WB engine.

Also, from quite a few messages, I get the feeling, that CM 8000 is very popular
for running tournaments for WB-engines. But, I guess now there is a problem.
Some WB engines will default to ponder on, and others will default to ponder
off. Now many problems can arise. I think, it will be not too obvious to all
users, which engines default to what. The tournament results can be very tilted,
because one engine can get 75% of the CPU on single CPU systems, while the
opponent gets only 25%.

For Yace, I decided to make ponder off the default. Perhaps this was the wrong
decision, but I have some reasons to do this - it is less than one minute work
for me, to default for ponder on.

I think, the Xboard protocoll described by Tim Mann is not very clear about this
issue. However, all the logs I have seen under different GUIs show all the same
behaviour. They either send hard or hard and easy.  The only exception is CM,
and I think this is very unfortunate.

Please also note, that your suggestion, to just send easy to turn ponder off is
not sufficient. In the WB protocol, easy is a toggle, while hard is a switch.
So, to turn ponder off, you have to send hard followed by easy. To me it seems
difficult, to explain all this to the "normal" user. A seleciton for permanent
brain on or off in the GUI looks much easier, when the GUI will send the right
commands to the engine afterwords. I cannot see, why you want to prefer to the
engine default.

Regards,
Dieter



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