Author: Christophe Theron
Date: 06:38:52 01/10/03
Go up one level in this thread
On January 10, 2003 at 05:00:39, David Rasmussen wrote:
>On January 09, 2003 at 19:05:34, Mogens Larsen wrote:
>
>>
>>By the same argument, you could say that anyone should avoid testing engines in
>>environments where they are likely to suck. If an engine is poor at blitz, it
>>shouldn't be tested at blitz timecontrols. Likewise with any other imaginable
>>parameter. Otherwise the tester obviously suck.
>>
>>If there's a bug, it should be fixed. If the bug causes inferior performance.
>>Too bad.
>>
>
>Exactly.
>
>EOD. I don't want to go to the strange and unknown place that is the weird
>logics of Thorsten.
>
>/David
That strange place is where everybody lives I think.
Configure ANY chess engine so it uses too much hash table for example, more than
the available RAM.
Then most chess engines are going to perform extremely poorly. Very old chess
engines that do not use hash tables on the other hand are going to look
extremely strong.
There are other settings that you can set to extreme values and that will make a
particular chess program dumb.
So there is an untold rule among programmer and users: we try to test the chess
programs with settings that do not handicap them. The idea is to see which
engine performs the best when they are set with optimal settings.
You can then complain that a particular chess engine has a problem with some
particular setting, but that's another story.
In the case exposed in this thread, I would agree that one can complain that
Chess Tiger does not work well when you use Fisher time controls. And this
should be fixed.
But I insist that testing Chess Tiger under Fisher time controls with big
increments is like giving a big handicap to Chess Tiger. You just expose a
weakness that lives in the time management of the engine, not in the core of its
chess knowledge. So the experiment is not really interesting in my opinion.
Christophe
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