Author: gerold daniels
Date: 05:53:15 06/17/05
Go up one level in this thread
On June 17, 2005 at 05:27:24, Marc Lacrosse wrote: >On June 16, 2005 at 18:05:26, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > > >>You can distinguish yourself really a lot from the 1000 others, by playing some >>serious time control. Like 40 in 2 + 20 in 1 + 15 (the fide time control that >>all competitions and big tournaments use here). Of course WITH permanent brain >>turned on at a dual core. 256MB hash or 400MB hash. Never cross the 512MB limit >>in windows. This is asking for trouble. >> >>Nearly everyone is either playing 5 0, or 15 0 , or 60 15 or 40 in 15 or 40 in >>25 or a very few do 90 0. >> >>Some real slow tournament level, yes even 90 30, will be very interesting to >>see. I can of course from head already write down which of the engines are the >>good blitzers among the engines you quote here. Everyone is doing blitz or rapid >>time controls. Some serious time control, at least 90 30, and preferably 40 in >>2, is interesting for me to watch your results. >> > >Dear Vincent, > >Regarding the subject of timing, I completely agree with you that we miss longer >time control games and tournaments. Being an active correspondence player myself >I am pretty concerned with this, and with the wish to get as good games as >possible. > >However there are not so stupid considerations you must deal with when planning >a single-man operated tournament. > >Some of these considerations are bound to the duration of the tournament. Due to >rapid evolution of both hardware and engines, it makes no sense IMHO to plan >something for a duration longer than a few months. Imagine I organize a 20 >engines tournament. There will be 20 * 19 / 2 = 90 individual encounters. >As I cannot hope to have more than two encounters played per day, this will be >going for 1.5 or two months which is optimal in my view. And I fear that the >actual number of encounters played per day will be closer to one per day which >is three months duration for the tournament. > >As I said in my original post, due to my specific situation, each individual >encouter has to be played in less than 12 hours. So I have some choices I must >face. Within this 12 hours lapse what should be played : two 6-hours games, >four 3-hours games, or at the extreme opposite end sixty 5-minutes blitzes. > >If I choose the slower time control, almost identical to the traditional FIDE >timing that you praise, each engine will have played 38 games at the end of the >tournament, which is by far too few to have any statistical signification >regarding relative strength of the engines. >At the opposite, if each encounter is made of sixty blitz games, each engine >will have played more than 1000 games at the end with a completely different >degree of statistical signification. > >There is today a very interesting thread initiated by Volker Pittlik on the >WBforum (http://wbforum.volker-pittlik.name/viewtopic.php?t=2849). According to >its tests there is a very constant relative rating of different engines >independently of the thinking time allowed in finding solution to the more or >less positional arasan test suite. And in the discussion Volker said : " If I >can choose between rating list based upon 100 games at blitz (if not run at a >stupid speed of all moves in one minute or so) and 10 games at 40/2 hours I >would choose the first. A completly different question is the quality of the >games..." > >So we come back to the necessary trade-off between a few longer better games and >a more significant number of weaker games. > >An additional point must also be considered. > >For personal reasons i wil have the tournament played under winboard + polyglot >with polyglot delivering the same opening book to all engines. Although I take a >book made of very good quality games, there is always the risk that one or >another among the positions from which the engines will become to play is not >equal, favoring one of the opponents. This arbitrary advantage will surely be >less prominent if the number of games is higher because ti will be more randomly >distributed. > >Another point : I am convinced that the quality of the evaluation delivered by a >given engine is not linearly related to the amount of thinking time. It's more >of an asymptotic curve. So if we compare the quality delivered at 3 minutes per >move (the traditional timing 40 moves in 2 hours) to that we can get at some >shorter time like 45 seconds per move, I think the quality of this latter will >be closer to that of conventional play than to that of 10 sec per move blitzes. > >So I think a good compromise could be to change my planned timing to 15 min >initial time + 30 seconds increment. In this case the maximal mean thinking time >per move would be 53 seconds for a 40 moves game, 45 seconds for a 60 moves game >and 38 seconds for a 120 moves game. This would result in a maximal game >duration of 70, 90 and 150 minutes for respectively 40, 60 and 120 moves played >so that I could hope to have 8 games played per elementary engine-engine >12-hours match. In this case, each engine will have played 152 games at the end >of the 20-engines tournament, which is already an interesting global amount of >games. > >Your opinion ? > >Marc good morning Marc. i agree with you on the time control. i prefer longer controls also but as you have stated it takes to long. with the free engines changing is often by the time of a long tourney some programs will be outdated. good luck on your up comming tourney. gerold.
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