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Subject: Re: A question about engine-engine games

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 10:17:48 07/06/99

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On July 04, 1999 at 17:29:35, blass uri wrote:

>
>On July 04, 1999 at 17:12:02, Bo Persson wrote:
>
><snipped>
>>Not quite.
>>
>>If you run under Windows, a program can behave badly and be a CPU hog. It can do
>>a number of "tricks", like increasing its own priority, to get more CPU time
>>from the system.
>>
>>This will be unfair to "the nice guy" who's program runs "properly" - share and
>>share alike.
>
>I do not suggest thinking and pondering at the same time.
>The only reason that the game is going to be twice longer is that instead of
>thinking and pondering at the same time I suggest to do it not at the same time
>so instead thinking and pondering for 2 minutes on the same time I need 4
>minutes(2 for one engine to think and 2 for the second engine to ponder without
>knowing the move of the first engine)
>
>Uri

I've explained this several times.  "ponder=off" (crafty terminology) is _not_
the way to play engine vs engine games.  I do _all_ of my testing with
ponder=on, and only use ponder=off for test suites and debugging.  My time
allocation code is tuned to run with ponder=on.  Running with it off will
most definitely cause some timing difficulties that are not normally seen.

I'd bet that if you ask, most programmers test with ponder=on and feel very
comfortable with their code.  But if you ask them to play a serious tournament
with ponder=off, I'd bet you would see a _lot_ of testing going on to make sure
that this doesn't break anything.

For _my_ program, "out-of-the-box" is the best way to run it, other than
customizing hash table size for your specific hardware.  Everything else is
_exactly_ as I run it on ICC, which means that the 'defaults' are the best that
I know how to do...

Changing anything will very likely weaken it.  Perhaps significantly...



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