Author: Sune Fischer
Date: 10:28:37 05/30/03
Go up one level in this thread
On May 30, 2003 at 12:51:15, Russell Reagan wrote: >On May 30, 2003 at 10:16:08, Frank Quisinsky wrote: > >>please thinking about your statement. >>We have x beta testers and x programmers where help us with beta results. >>Do you thinking that all of this persons make a bad work. > >Hi Frank, > >I don't think Uri meant there was anything wrong with the Arena software. I >think he meant there are better default settings. For example, I too would >prefer if automaitc adjudication and autoamtic draws were disabled by default. >If I was running a big tournament like Leo, then maybe I would turn it on to >save time, but if I am testing my own program, I want my program to play until >the end of the game because I want to see how it plays and I want to find bugs >in my program. I can change these settings, so it is no big deal, but if a new >user tries his engine in Arena, he may not know about automatic adjudication and >automatid draws, and he may waste a week trying to find a bug in his program >(even though there is no bug). I agree the default setting in this case is a little unfortunate. Maybe it would also be better if Arena wrote directly "game adjurcated by Arena as draw", rather than "draw agreed", which is misleading, at least for engines that do actually offer and accept draws. Another thing I would like in Arena is the possibility to load and unload an engine. Preferably by an icon, or if placed as a menu option give it a fast shortcut. The reason is that when you need to recompile, you have to close the gui and start it up again, which takes time. Arena also seems to be a little slow on starting up the engines, it takes 3-5 secs, in winboard it takes less than 1 sec, it's so fast that I never notice it. I'm not sure if this is arena's fault or mine, but it does seem to apply to all engines. When two engines gets loaded they are started up one at a time and the total startup time becomes borderline annoyingly long for my taste. Maybe it would be possible to start them up in parallel? I use this dual analysis feature a lot, it is real nice to compare output from two engines on the fly. :) I also think we will see more FRC-engines soon, now that there is a GUI to support it. Personally I like the idea of generalizing the game, it forces one to abstract one more level when coding the evaluation function. Things such as pawn structure and center control must be rethought and generalized, possibly leading to a better understanding of the essence of the game. -S.
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