Author: Miguel A. Ballicora
Date: 10:00:27 08/02/01
I have an idea for debugging that probably was used before but I want some opinions about it: I am thinking about a system to trace what is going in my engine when I see a weird move during a game. The main problem is that it is extremely difficult to reproduce the same conditions for search. I have seen once in a while a very weird move that I cannot reproduce it if I set the position to search. The obvious reason is because the tables, hash and history bring information that I lack when I try to reproduce. Clearing the tables before each move would be (I think) an easy way out. The engine in this state will be easy to debug but I would be dodging the problem. In that way I would not see problems caused by the tables. I would be debugging probably only part of the engine, dodging the most prone to errors!. Saving the tables is out of the question, I would fill my HD in no time. What I think I can do is to save how many nodes I searched in any particular move. When I ran out of time I keep record of the nodes. When I try to reproduce the game I set the limit of thinking in "nodes", rather than "time". I should be able to reach exactly the same situation in the search in each of the moves of the games. Moreover, I should be able to reproduce the whole thing with the debug version. Maybe I can store a log with all this information and after the game let the program chew it and see if the reproduction is exact. I think that debugging is tedious, boring but extremely important to make the engine play the way we want. Particularly for chess programs where the bugs are nasty because sometimes the program does not crash, it just plays worse "sometimes". I just came up with this idea this morning, is there anything that I am missing? suggestions? Is it obvious and everybody already does this? Regards, Miguel PS: I think that this kind of testing could be done also with pondering! just limiting the pondering to n = nodes.
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