Author: Thomas Mayer
Date: 21:06:14 11/03/01
Go up one level in this thread
Hi Bas, > Against Diep Winboard's clock was slightly out of sync with the real clock. > Don't ever let that happen! Amazing how fast the difference grows and you > CAN'T adjust the clock in Winboard. A couple of minutes difference is > *deadly*. And, though it is allowed to adjust the engine clock, apparently it > is not allowed to restart Winboard+engine with a corrected time. Vincent was > the first to point that out to the tournament directors. "Not allowed! If I > can't restart my engine for table bases, HE can't bla bla bla..." (Tao +0.90 > Diep +0.001 but drawish IMO). Whatever I would have done in this situation, > *not* this pityful "no no, not allowed!". The 30 nullmoves from Diep that > followed to push Tao through the flag I can forgive, but not the "nono". That's why I do it a little bit different for tournaments in Quark. Tournamenttimecontrols in Quark are hard coded, but need anyway the time information of Winboard. That's how it work: I set Winboard always to the full time, e.g. in Leiden to 90 minutes (if there is a cut somewhere, it is hardcoded, that Quark must play the first 40 moves in xx minutes) Now what is Quark doing ? There is a setable variable in its ini file, called operatortime - a good value for this is 12. Internally it had a correction time, this grows each move (move, not half move) about this value. When it gets the winboard-time, it substracts the correction time from the winboard-time and has now a prediction about what is on the clock. Before every move, the engine writes something to the the .debug - file: Time from Winboard, Correction time, Time it thinks must be on the clock. I check the .debug file through game with the tail-utility. (Works fine under NT/2000/XP) Because the opening moves are played without clock you get initially a quite nice bonus which you can add later - there are 2 commands in Quark to correct the internal correction time by a value, so when Quark thinks it has to much time on clock then I must add something to the correction time, else I can substract something. If the game will be very long, you must change the operatortime later in the game... (But thats only interesting, when you have much over 100 moves) - a quite playable value is 6-8 seconds if your concentration is high enough. With that system I was so far NEVER in time troubles, and I have always an overview what Quark thinks what is on the real clock, so it's easy to correct. Oh, only once I had a time problem - Vincent did not tell me, that he has moved already and my clock runs for about 10 minutes without that I know it... But I correct internal time and didn't miss the cut at all - I spent one minute on the idea to miss the cut anyway, because I was very unhappy about the game, but that wouldn't be very sportsmanlike... a "no, no" is also not very sportsmanlike... I would understand this from commercial programs - they fight for every point and every point is money - but from amateurs ? Well... How about pushing the reset-button by accident to have a crash ??? :) Greets, Thomas P.S.: You can test that with the v1.50 of Quark on my homepage, Leiden-System would be tournamentmode blitz (which means just sudden death) and operatortime 12... now start winboard with /debug and load the engine, set complete time for game to 90 minutes and control the winboard.debug - you will see the info given by Quark. With Alt-1 you can send commands to your engine, the commands for adjusting clock in tournamentmode are: adjust+time <x> - adds x seconds to the correction time, adjust-time <x> - substract x seconds from the correction time and last command: operatortime <x> - sets operatortime to x seconds... with those commands an easy adjustment can be made...
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