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Subject: Re: testing with unequal time control

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 04:47:24 01/25/06

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On January 25, 2006 at 07:21:41, Kolss wrote:

>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.

I prefer to use winboard for that reason but unfortunately winboard does not
support unequal time control(latest version support unequal time control when
white get more time but I want unequal time control when one engine get more
time.

I can play 2 matches one with white get more time and one with black get more
time but it means that I have limited computer time for testing and I do not
like to spend time for irrelevant testing.

Uri



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