Indicating to tournament engines not to use NNUE

[Erwacht]

Hi, all!

So I was recently trying some non-standard positions -- for instance, each side starting with fifteen knights. I have been using Stockfish 14.1, naturally. However, on some powerful hardware that I was able to try this out on -- something with a very nice GPU --, it seems that Stockfish 14.1 tries to use NNUE, which crashes on such non-standard positions. I am doing this in tournament mode, as well, to facilite running multiple games with different time settings (using time odds) and automatically saving the results.

How can I indicate in WinBoard to Stockfish to disable NNUE during a tournament? Ideally, it would be nice to be able to have Stockfish know not to use it if it isn't applicable, since in a WinBoard tournament I might like to step through different positions in a positions file, some of them closer to normal enough to use NNUE and some of them not (such as with fifteen knights). I imagine that ideal solution is a matter of Stockfish programming that needs to change? However, there should be an option in WinBoard and available and applicable to tournament play which turns off the option of NNUE preemptively. It is a real tradgedy to have to fall back on Stockfish 10 or something to analyze these positions (or to switch to inferior hardware which, not having a GPU of sufficient power, doesn't tempt Stockfish 14.1 to try to use NNUE).

What can be done about this in WinBoard options?

[H.G.Muller]

I know little about Stockfish, but I assume that it supports an engine option to decide whether NNUE is switched on or not. You can change the value of such options through WinBoard's Engine Settings dialogs. If there is no such option, then indeed you would have to alter Stockfish. Nothing that WinBoard can do about how engines work internally.