How can I disable adjudication in WinBoard_F 4.3.14k?

[Don Cross]

I am working on my new chess engine (called Flywheel).
It is still in the early stages, and I am trying to debug a case where I play it against itself (Two Machines mode) and it finds a forced win with K+Q vs K, but does not carry through with the mate. WinBoard_F 4.3.14k is automatically adjudicating the win based on the scores the two instances of Flywheel are both agreeing on.

How do I disable the automatic adjudication? I have been searching for about 20 minutes now with Google, this forum's search, and through the program menus, but no luck yet. I know I must be missing something obvious.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Don

[Guenther Simon]

I am working on my new chess engine (called Flywheel).
It is still in the early stages, and I am trying to debug a case where I play it against itself (Two Machines mode) and it finds a forced win with K+Q vs K, but does not carry through with the mate. WinBoard_F 4.3.14k is automatically adjudicating the win based on the scores the two instances of Flywheel are both agreeing on.

How do I disable the automatic adjudication? I have been searching for about 20 minutes now with Google, this forum's search, and through the program menus, but no luck yet. I know I must be missing something obvious.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Don

Hi Don,

=>Options =>Engines
set the field for the adjudication threshold
to highest possible value or may be zero works even better
as flag for no adjudication at all, but I don't remember
exactly anymore for the zero value.

or look in the WB.ini file for the parameter

/adjudicateLossThreshold='X'

Guenther

[Don Cross]

Hi Guenther,

What you said helped, although something weird is going on. I had already tried setting the adjudication threshold to a value larger than any score my engine ever returns. Flywheel's checkmate score is 110000 pawns, or 11000000 centipawns. I had set the threshold to 100000000 centipawns (one hundred million), but it was still adjudicating the game before checkmate. I just changed the threshold to one billion and now it is acting the way I want.

I must be getting confused with my powers of 10 somewhere, but I don't see it. My request for a future version of WinBoard_F would be to have a way to simply turn off adjudication altogether, without having to count zeroes on the end of a huge number!

[Olivier Deville]

Hi Don and Guenther

/adjudicateLossThreshold=0 does the trick

Olivier

[Don Cross]

Thanks guys. I know I tried 0 also, but maybe it doesn't work if the game is already in progress, or you load a game from a PGN file that has already ended and then use the Truncate Game feature?

Please tell me I'm not crazy!!!

I will set it to 0 and leave it there, and I'm sure it will be fine.

Thanks again for the help!

[H.G.Muller]

This is a Winboard_x feature. I never paid any attention to it, as I intensely dislike this kind of adjudication. But a peek in the source seems to tell the following:

Indeed the value used during an entire WinBoard run is the value that is at startup in the .ini file (or on the command line). Using the Option->Engine menu to change it will have no effect in the current run, other tha that after exiting WinBoard the new value is written to the .ini file. (If you have /saveSettingsOnExit=true, that is.) But it has no effect on the value that is used in games of the current run.

I am not sure why Alessandro implemented it that way; it seems a bug.

Note that setting the adjudicateLossThreshold to 0 should disable it. But also note that to use it, the value should be negative! The engine loses if its score is below the given threshold for 6 plies. Another peculiarity: what you enter in the Options->Engine dialog is flipped in sign before it is used. So if you enter something there, it should be positive, while if you set it through the .ini file ore a command-line option, it should be negative.