Winboard Forum

I've found a small bug in xboard 4.7.1 when using an engine on FICS (and probably in general). This bug was not in xboard 4.6.2.
The nodes per second is wrong by a factor 100 I believe. 100 times smaller than it actually is. For example in the screenshot I've taken you can see that the engine has evaluated 14.8 million moves in about 14 seconds, so roughly 1 million moves per second. However the NPS shows roughly 10,000 NPS which is 100 times less than what it really is.
In xboard 4.6.2 I'd get "1M NPS".

I cannot reproduce this (using Fruit). For me, the NPS displayed in the Engine-Output window is exactly what it is supposed to be. It would be hard to find the problem without a debug file made while the problem was occurring.

H.G.Muller wrote:I cannot reproduce this (using Fruit). For me, the NPS displayed in the Engine-Output window is exactly what it is supposed to be. It would be hard to find the problem without a debug file made while the problem was occurring.

I tested xboard 4.7.1 this time under ubuntu 12.04 64 bits instead of 32 bits. I still get a similar problem. I used the engine "stockfish" instead of critter.

As you can see, the NPS is 10 times smaller than it really is, in this case. It shows 122060 NPS for a period of 8.91 seconds. If that were true, I'd get 1.09 M nodes in total. But it's displayed 10.9M nodes in total, and this number is the true one.
So the display of "122060" is wrong here. It should be 10 times bigger.

By the way I'm willing to create a debug file, but I have no experience at all with this. Can you explain me how to do it? Thank you.

I also inquired on TalkChess if anyone had ever seen something like this, and someone suggested that it might not be so much that it calculates it wrong, but that it simply clips the display so that the lower digits are pushed out of view.

Can you check what happens if you size width of the Engine Output window in such a case? Maybe it is just a matter of allowing more space in the NPS field. I notice your clocks are also clipped. Is this the GTK or the Xaw build? (I cannot see that from the screenshots at this resolution.)

H.G.Muller wrote:I also inquired on TalkChess if anyone had ever seen something like this, and someone suggested that it might not be so much that it calculates it wrong, but that it simply clips the display so that the lower digits are pushed out of view.

Can you check what happens if you size width of the Engine Output window in such a case? Maybe it is just a matter of allowing more space in the NPS field. I notice your clocks are also clipped. Is this the GTK or the Xaw build? (I cannot see that from the screenshots at this resolution.)

Yeah I thought about the resizing, so I enlarged and even reduced to almost no space but the display didn't change at all.
With respect to the clock "problem" I think it's because I have less packages than when I had a 32 bits system (as you can see in my first screenshot of a few months ago), probably related to some fonts but I am not sure.
About the build, I believe it is the Xaw build (I remember I had to download this package in order to compile xboard).

Well, there are strong indications that it is a size problem, because someone reports that when he replaces the NPS by N in the source code, he can see the digits that would otherwise be missing. Please try the following:

In the file nengineoutput.c, you will fid the following table that describes the Engine Output window:

Code: Select all

Option engoutOptions[] = {
{  0,  LL|T2T,           17, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Icon, " " },
{  0, L2L|T2T|SAME_ROW, 163, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Label, N_("engine name") },
{  0,     T2T|SAME_ROW,  30, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Icon, " " },
{  0, R2R|T2T|SAME_ROW, 188, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Label, N_("move") },
{  0,  RR|T2T|SAME_ROW,  80, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Label, N_("NPS") },
{200, T_VSCRL | T_TOP,  500, NULL, (void*) &mem1, "", (char**) MemoProc, TextBox, "" },
{  0,         0,         0, NULL, NULL, "", NULL, Break , "" },
{  0,  LL|T2T,           17, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Icon, " " },
{  0, L2L|T2T|SAME_ROW, 163, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Label, N_("engine name") },
{  0,     T2T|SAME_ROW,  30, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Icon, " " },
{  0, R2R|T2T|SAME_ROW, 188, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Label, N_("move") },
{  0,  RR|T2T|SAME_ROW,  80, NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, Label, N_("NPS") },
{200, T_VSCRL | T_TOP,  500, NULL, (void*) &mem2, "", (char**) MemoProc, TextBox, "" },
{   0,      NO_OK,       0, NULL, NULL, "", NULL, EndMark , "" }
};

The third coulumn of this table is the width of the various elements. Replace the 188 by 168, and the 80 by 100 (each 2x), to give 20 pixels from the move field to the NPS field, and recompile. Then check if the problem still persists.

Thank you very much. That fixed the problem entirely.
I assure you that resizing the Engine Output window manually didn't fix the problem.
I guess this file had been modified since xboard 4.6.2; I never had that problem with xboard 4.6.2.

Anyway thank you very much. Problem solved.
By the way yes, it seems like I compiled with Xaw and not GTK.