Author: William Penn
Date: 03:50:29 11/25/01
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On November 25, 2001 at 06:03:13, Keith Kitson wrote: >I have been running Fritz 7 on a 1.2 Athlon thunderbird (Win98) with 256Mb Hash >(from 512 Mb ram) and utilising Infinite analysis. I have found the MMX version >to become unstable after several hours analysis. As quoted elsewhere the >nodecount is also down. > >I have found the 'no MMX' version to be more stable and much faster, and no >unstability problems so far. > >Has anyone else had the MMX version of Fritz 7 eventually come to a grinding >halt and lock the system up requiring switch off? This has happened several >times now, so I have switched to the 'no MMX' version permanently now. > >I would welcome any comments on what may be happening here with the MMX version. > >Is it perhaps creating memory problems on the system (i.e. using up all >available ram, slowing the machine down until it grinds to a halt?) > >Keith Which interface? I have tried both Fritz 7 engines under the Deep Fritz interface (W98se 256MB Celeron 500) and don't have that problem. I would tend to suspect some other software that is running simultaneously (multitasking). For example I can't run my anti-virus software or firewall at the same time as running Chessbase engines, while also online and accessing some java sites like chesslab.com. That is a certain recipe for the blue screen of death. But if I disable the anti-virus software and firewall, then I seldom have a problem. After various tests I concluded that the engine with MMX is buggy because it doesn't handle active Queens properly in analysis. It may give away the Queen, or fail to capture opponent's Queen, so I can't trust it to produce reliable analysis. That was the original MMX version, and I haven't tried the updated version. I'm not sure if I will. That takes a fair amount of time and effort, but I lost confidence in it. The version without MMX is of course faster. Whether it is stronger, I don't know. I'm not too interested in ordinary strength, but I do need reliable analysis. The worst I can say about the No MMX engine is that I've noticed one instance of incredibly dumb endgame analysis. It failed to recognize that two connected passed pawns one rank apart are unassailable by opponent's King. The trailing pawn cannot be captured otherwise the leading pawn Queens. Very elementary stuff. That means I am now unable to trust it for endgame analysis. One final observation, although I'm not sure exactly what it means... Chessmaster has a bad habit of producing "ghosts" on the taskbar. Ghosts look like something (a program, or whatever) is running, but it actually isn't. Sometimes they are empty, just a little rectangle on the taskbar without any icon or text. I guess that somehow the taskbar just isn't updated properly. Usually the ghosts disappear if I click them, but occasionally a system reset is necessary to get rid of them. I haven't noticed any ghosts with the Chessbase engines before, but now the Fritz 7 engines produce them. So whatever Chessmaster is doing in that regard, Fritz 7 is also now doing. I have seen them mentioned elsewhere, and apparently some people have more problems with them than others. WP
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