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Schoolbook. (Updated!) 8x10 chess with the rook + knight and bishop + knight pieces added. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Sep 19, 2009 06:44 AM UTC:
Well, I guess if some participants only can play with some fixed time per move, which does not accumulate when they are fast and do not use all their time, this will severely handicap those engines. So it would only be fair if you would handicap the other engines likewise. The quality of the play for a given invested amount of CPU time would go down by this, but you might consider that less of a drawback than favoring the engines with more versatile time management.

An engine playing at 1 move / N sec would be able to quickly build uo some time reserve during the first 10 moves (in which they are unlikly to lose the game already, because both sides will be underdeveloped in this phase), and then have the advantage of being able to alot more time on difficult moves, which the others can't. So perhaps it is not as bad as I first thought to use the 1 move / N minute mode, and certainly fairer towards the opponents.

WinBoard does have a TC mode where you can set fixed, non-accumulatng time per move, but it is cannot be set from the TC dialog, and my engines do not support it well. (Joker80 would play, but probably use less than 30% of its time, while Fairy-Max would sooner or later forfeit every game, because it does not have an emergency break to cut extreme flukes of its highly variable search time.) But I notice that you do not play Fairy-Max anyway (although I was under the impression that it is a lot stronger than ChessV).

It depeds a bit on your philosophy, I guess. Is it fair that engines with more advanced time management have a better chance of winning? Some would say yes, because time management is part of the game. Others would be interested purely in the quality of the search engine.

As to the docs: This might be an idea, although the help file of WinBoard is already very long. As I did not change any of the basic TC modes, which have been around for decades, I did not change the docs on it either. I had to add enough for describing all the enhancements I made, and concentrated on that. But now that I look at it I see that the description is not very clear. In addition, I added time-odds controls to this dialog, and tey are not described in the menu section at all. So I guess I should make some additions here anyway.