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Subject: Re: Comet captures its own King at e1 of 5th game in Comet-Crafty match

Author: Ulrich Tuerke

Date: 08:38:29 05/28/98

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On May 28, 1998 at 01:56:39, Komputer Korner wrote:

>I don't get any Crafty flagging any more using WINBOARD 3.6.9  but it
>still
>doesn't use it's opening book in WINBOARD. However the subject is a new
>phenomenon that I haven't seen since the missing a1 rooks that Crafty
>caused
>by the ..... info that Tim has now fixed when both programs ponder. I
>will
>send the log and debug files to Tim. After 1.f3xe1?????????????????e5
>2.Nf3e4  Comet let it's flag fall by thinking for 10 minutes.  I guess
>it
>didn't know what to do without a king:)))))))).  Not only was the self
>mate
>king capture illegal but the Knight started the game at f3!!!!!!!!!!!.
>--

Meanwhile, Tim Mann was so kind to send me the debug file and his
conclusions/assumptions about the above problem. (Of course, the move
f3e1 referred to the previous game, and not to the new one).

There seems to be a problem in communication between the new winboard
and comet when the multi-game mode in winboard is used. In fact, this is
completely untested in Comet because this feature comes with the new
winboard version, just going to be released.

As far as I understood from Tim, winboard uses a timeout of 5 seconds
between interrupting the chess engine and the subsequent start of the
new game. Tim's conclusion is that there seem to be cases where Comet
needs more than 5 seconds to interrupt its search. The above problem is
of this kind. Unfortunately, I am not able to produce situations where
Comet can't be quickly interrupted. I can't reproduce the problem at
all. When pondering or searching, Comet looks about twice per second if
new input is present (using the routines suggested in the Crafty and
Gnuchesx source code "PeekNamedPipe"). So 5 seconds should be more than
sufficient.

May be someone knows if it is possible that the windows pipes can have
some peculiar timing behaviour ?

Any hint is welcome.

Regards, Uli




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