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Subject: Re: A question about engine-engine games

Author: blass uri

Date: 13:07:36 07/06/99

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On July 06, 1999 at 15:19:06, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 06, 1999 at 15:00:15, blass uri wrote:
>
>>
>>On July 06, 1999 at 13:17:48, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On July 04, 1999 at 17:29:35, blass uri wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>On July 04, 1999 at 17:12:02, Bo Persson wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>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...
>>
>>I explained that there is no problem to do something eqvivalent to ponder=on in
>>1 computer.
>>The only difference is that the games will be longer because the actions are
>>going to be not in the same time instead of the same time.
>>
>>Uri
>
>
>Uri:
>
>listen _carefully_.  If you run a program with pondering disabled, it will
>_screw up_ things.  It doesn't matter whether you double the time control or
>not.  The program has to be told about the extra time.

I did not suggest to disable pondering but to do something that leads to the
same results as pondering in one computer.
I agree that chessbase does not do it.

It is simple to do it in one computer by the following steps
We start with step 1 when A is out of book.

step 1: Engine A "thinks" about a reply to engine B  and does the move.

step 2: Engine B gets the following information:Engine A played a move and used
x seconds for the move(Engine B does not get the move of Engine A).

Engine B ponder for x seconds and only after x seconds get the information about
the move of Engine A(The time per game for Engine B does not change during these
x seconds).

steps 3,4 are similiar to steps 1,2
The deatails of these steps:

step 3: Engine B "thinks" about the reply to Engine A and does a move ( now the
time per game for engine B is changed)

step 4: Engine A gets the following information:Engine B played a move and used
y seconds for the move(Engine A does not get the move of Engine B).

Engine A ponder for y seconds and only after y seconds get the information about
the move of Engine B(The time per game for Engine A does not change during these
y seconds).

step n+4 can be described by the same words as step n.

Uri



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