Check out McCooey's Hexagonal Chess, our featured variant for May, 2025.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Mar 30, 2015 09:45 AM UTC:
I never saw any difference depending on the quality of play, in such tests. The score from a particular starting position was the same, whether I played it at 40 moves/10 min, 5 min, 2 min or 1 min. So I don't think there is any reason to assume longer thinking time will make the results more reliable.

What is always a concern, however, is the number of games. With normal draw rates (about 30%) the typical error in the measured score percentage would be 40%/sqrt(N), where N is the number of games. So even with 100 games the error is still some 4%, while Pawn odds in orthoChess results in a score advantage of about 18% (i.e. 68% total). So with 100 games you will typically get errors of about 0.25 Pawn, in the strength determination. With only 10 games between two armies the error would be about 12.5%, i.e. about 0.7 Pawn. This is more that the typical difference between the armies (although the extreme case of Nutters vs FIDE came out above 1 Pawn), so in most cases any observed advantage with so few games would just be due to luck rather than strength.

For this reason I now always test at 40 moves/min, as that makes it easier to collect the several hundred games I need to reduce the random noise to below 0.1 Pawn. I don't know how that would translate to Zillions time controls. I suppose that Zillions at 3 min/move could beat Fairy-Max at my average 1.5 sec/move. (I do not have Zillions.) One should take into account that when engines get a maximum or fixed time per move, they rarely can use all the time effectively, and might waste more than half of it, while in classical time controls the engine can allocate time such that none of it is wasted.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Chess with Different Armies

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.