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Subject: Re: What is the consensus of "The King" without the CM GUI?

Author: John Merlino

Date: 16:27:06 07/02/01

Go up one level in this thread


On July 02, 2001 at 18:30:06, Mike S. wrote:

>On July 02, 2001 at 18:07:25, Scott Woods wrote:
>
>>My experience is that "The King" plays a lot better without the CM GUI.
>>
>>As a lot of people were interested in how to import into Fritz, Shredder etc.
>>
>>Question:  What is the view on "The King" engine without the CM GUI.
>
>I must admit that I cannot answer your question, because I do not use The King
>outside of the CM GUI. But recently, I was into a discussion about The King
>being slower in it's own (CM) GUI - and it turned out, that the reason was the
>GUI setup (in other words, which options were chosen in Chessmaster).
>
>I think this has been discussed here before, but some time ago.
>
>If (a) the "Chessmaster" checkbox in the Thinking lines window is *not* checked
>(only white or black), and (b) the "Visual Thinking" windows is *not* used, then
>The King's performance must be at least equal than in other GUIs.
>
>The options (a), and also (b) if I'm not wrong, would start a TheKing.exe task
>of their own, which runs parallel to the engine which plays the game, slowing it
>down a lot (the SSDF had this problem too and they had to restart their CM8K
>test run because of that).
>
>Regards,
>M.Scheidl

You are entirely correct, although there may be a little confusion in how you
worded one of your statements. Options a) and b) WILL start up a "mentor" engine
task to "watch" the game, as it were. BUT, if a) has already started up a task,
and option b) is ALSO selected, then both of them will use the same mentor
engine. There can never be more than three engine tasks active at the same time:
White, Black and Mentor.

To comment further, it would be very surprising if the performance of The King
outside the CM GUI was noticeably better than inside the CM GUI. My tests (which
have been verified by Johan de Koning and others) show that the currently active
engines share about 92-95% of the CPU (assuming an optimized test system).

Even if a different GUI could squeeze out a few more CPU percentage points, I
would be surprised if it would make The King "play a lot better".

Now, if you're talking about using other opening books that are a PART of the
other GUI, then that's a completely different topic.

jm



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