Author: Angrim
Date: 18:25:25 01/15/04
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On January 15, 2004 at 16:09:14, Bob Durrett wrote: > >In another thread there was some discussion of what happens in a chess engine >when the sudden death deadline approaches and the engine must move very fast. > >The impression I got from that discussion is that the engine simply does not >work as intended because chess programmers assume, perhaps subconsciously, that >there will be enough time for the intended computations. When there is not >enough time the programmer's intentions are thwarted. > >I wonder whether or not any engines have been designed to perform differently in >such situations where time has almost run out. > >Perhaps of more interest is the question: "How would an engine designed to play >extremely fast chess differ from normal engines?" No endgame tables(a single disk access can take longer than the entire search should) and much finer timer granularity. >An artificial special case of practical interest would be where the engine's >opponent were given several minutes per move but the engine given only a couple >of seconds per move and pondering off. > >Bob D. "a couple of seconds per move" is NOT extremely fast, the case that gets hard is when the engine has a fraction of a second per move. At that speed, things like timer accuracy that don't matter at normal speeds become vital. For instance if your goal time is 1/9 of a second, and you have a timer function that checks if your time is up every 1/10 of a second, you might end up spending 2/10 of a second on the move which is much more than your goal time. Or if you are pondering and only check for input every 1/10 of a second, you might not know that the opponent had moved and it is now your turn to move till your time goal is mostly used up. Another example of a "Extremely Fast Bullet" problem is that I don't even start to check how much time I have left till I have finished the first 3 ply deep search. I had to lower this to 2 ply deep for crazyhouse chess because I was sometimes taking long enough to finish 3 ply deep that I could lose on time in games without increment. Angrim
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