Winboard Forum

Thank you always for your easy-to-follow explanation. I begin to like this program even more

two simple questions here.

1. When I play with computer, Is it normal that turnning on ponder next move option also turns on my fan in the lap? my guess is it gives the cpu the continuous workload even it's my turn? my presumption is by allowing the pondering, Winboard is using some chunk of my cpu resources so it increases the heat and therefore awakes the fan. (when I turned this option off, the noise was gone)

2. Can I set the searchTime in the command line less than 1 second? for instance, give the engine 0.5sec per move. Couldn't find how in the manual



have a nice day amigo!

Having a chess engine thing is a CPU-intensive task. Nowadays computers have CPUs with many 'cores' (basically independent CPUs situated on the same chip), while each such core is usually able to mimic two independent CPUs ('hyper threads') each only a little bit slower than the original one. Some chess engines can fully occupy many such cores or hyper threads simultaneous, for speeding up the thinking process; these usually have an option like 'Threads' with which you can control how many they are allowed to use. Other engines can never use more than a single core or hyper thread.

The more heavily you load the CPU chip, the more heat it produces. And it throttles the fan based on its temperature. So it is quite normal that the fan speeds up when you are doing heavy calculations. With 'ponder on' the chess engine would be calculating all the time. Without it, it might calculate only a small fraction of the time, depending on how long you have it think, compared to how long you think yourself. If the fraction is small enough, and the thinking time short enough, it might not heat up enough during its own thinking to speed up the fan, and then have enough time to cool in a natural way while it is your turn.

Fixed time per move with less than one second is unfortunately not possible; you can set it on a 'classical time control' of 40 moves in 20 sec (0:20), though, to get 0.5 sec per move on average. (Or set it for 2 moves / 0:01). You could also use a longer setting, and specify a large 'time-odds' factor for the engine; this then reduces the engine's time by the given factor.