Author: Kolss
Date: 04:21:41 01/25/06
Go up one level in this thread
On January 25, 2006 at 06:01:18, Uri Blass wrote: >I wonder if people tried to use arena to test rybka with reduced strength and if >arena works without bugs with that feature. > >testing it with movei suggest that arena1.1 can steal significant time from >engines and it may be the reason for the strange results in 1+1 under arena that >I read here(I found that more than 0.5 second was stolen from movei after >playing the first move and similiar situation for other moves). > >I wonder if there is a good interface that cause no problems for testing with >unequal time control because it seems that arena may be good only for slow time >control in the best case and testing movei with 40 minutes/40 moves against >rybka with 4 minutes/40 moves can take a long time. > >Uri Hi, I have never tried to test with time handicap. We never use Arena for testing though - with good reason: Perhaps it is my incapability, but the Arena GUI is *painfully* slow. The loss of 0.5 seconds per move is absolutely normal. Although I tried to switch off most of the features with which the GUI is totally overloaded, it is still extremely slow. Especially the display of principal variations seems to take up enormous amounts of time (I have already switched off the move list window, as that is even almost worse...). Something seems to go seriously wrong there (I have this problem on all of my computers, some of which are *not* slow). You can say whatever you want about the Chessbase GUI, but it is certainly amazingly fast. The loss of time for communication and display must probably be measured in microseconds, at most milliseconds, while for Arena, it is in centiseconds or even seconds, and some of this time is deduced from the engine'e clock. For me, that renders the Arena GUI useless for matches with short time control. You have to make sure that the time left on the clock never drops below about 1 minute in a *normal* game (meaning within about 150 moves) to avoid that time scramble (and time forfeits) becomes an issue. That excludes all blitz games. Again, this is just my personal observation and possibly my inability to work with the Arena GUI properly; also, it holds for Arena 1.1 - I don't know whether this problem has been tackled in succeeding versions... Best regards - Munjong.
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