Winboard Forum

Hi,

Making Naum analyze positions under the above mentioned GUI's I found that some LCT2 positions make Naum crash under Arena while there is no problem under Shredder Classic.
Such positions are No 23, 27, 30 and 35. Can it be it has something to do with EGTB's? I have only 3 and 4 piece tablebases installed on this machine.
I remember having the same problem with an earlier version, perhaps 1.2.

Hi Gabor,

What version of the Arena?
Send me the FEN and maybe more info like depth after which crash occurs, and I will take a look.

I didn't change anything in the egtb code.

Regards,
Alex

Naum wrote:Hi Gabor,

What version of the Arena?
Send me the FEN and maybe more info like depth after which crash occurs, and I will take a look.

I didn't change anything in the egtb code.

Regards,
Alex

Hi Alex,

I don't know if you received my private message.

I use the fresh 1.1 version of Arena. The strange thing is that I tried LCT2 position No23 on another machine and everything was OK. That was an Athlon XP, while the problematic case occurred on a PIII.

I'll investigate the matter more closely and I will let you know, probably tomorrow.

BTW, I can find no e-mail address of yours.

Regards,
G?bor

I tried the position you sent me on my P4 with both Arena 1.08 and 1.1
Analysis went fine with no crashes.
I managed to crash Arena 1.1 once before I even started the analysis (I had 2 engines opened and I closed the first one, and crash!).
It seems 1.1 is not 100% bug free. I also got some I/O exception with it when I tried to set the path to EGTB during initial setup.

Anyhow, I don't think there is a problem with the engine.

Regards,
Alex

From what I've read here and in CCC, I have the impression that most crashes in Arena happen under winXP. I have two computers with winXP and win2k. The one with win2k has never crashed with Arena (IIRC). The XP crashes twice a day.
On the other hand, some XP users report zero problems.
I'm trying to think of any configuration issue in XP that can conflict with Arena.
Any ideas?

Actually the crash I reported was under win2k.

WinXP has system save and restore feature. I know this was causing problems with the Fritz GUI before (fixed in the later versions).

Alex

Naum wrote:I tried the position you sent me on my P4 with both Arena 1.08 and 1.1
Analysis went fine with no crashes.
I managed to crash Arena 1.1 once before I even started the analysis (I had 2 engines opened and I closed the first one, and crash!).
It seems 1.1 is not 100% bug free. I also got some I/O exception with it when I tried to set the path to EGTB during initial setup.

Anyhow, I don't think there is a problem with the engine.

Regards,
Alex

Hi Alex,

This is really strange. I tried the position with various hash table settings. The error (allegedly a read error, as reported by Win2k) occurred only when the setting was 48 MB (common for all UCI engines under Arena). I tried 32 MB, 96 MB, 128 MB. Even values such as 46 MB or 50 MB did not cause problems. Also not with the other critical positions I reported.

Then... I returned to 48 MB and Naum did not crash this time! Unbelievable!

And now I keep trying to make it crash but I can't! Exiting, restarting Arena also does not "help". This is going to drive me mad.

I don't think I have made any changes to the computer since yesterday. It must be something in the background I am not aware of.

So much for the moment.

Best regards,
G?bor