AEGT: Queen Class

[Heinz van Kempen]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Heinz van Kempen at 03 August 2004 22:43:53:

Hi all ,
AEGT Rook class was updated this morning and will be again tomorrow evening.
Queen Class is updated with two Nunn positions 7 and 10. One thing to explain here: Nunn positions are chosen by drawing lots. Ralf plays another with Nunn position 15 (available this weekend) and three more double round robins will follow with three different Nunn positions and others will be used in the gauntlets afterwards. This is important, because engines, as we already know, perform very differently with each position and so we have a better estimation which is better overall.
Games are available for download and in replay zone where I now omitted the automated replay, so maybe also those who are still using a modem have a chance to check the games.
http://www.husvankempen.de/nunn/
Best Regards
Heinz

[Heinz van Kempen]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Heinz van Kempen at 04 August 2004 13:06:27:
Als Antwort auf:/In reply to: AEGT: Queen Class geschrieben von:/posted by: Heinz van Kempen at 03 August 2004 22:43:53:

Hi Tim and Odd Gunnar,
I will use of course the new adapter from Odd Gunnar for all engines as soon as it is available for download. And also the improved Wb2UCI.eng file proposed as soon as I start the new double round robins. Thanks again for your work, Odd Gunnar.
Until then I watch every Green Light Chess game. It just happened again and I saw that Green Light Chess needed one minute and 10 seconds before starting to calculate the first move after the pregiven Nunn position moves obtaining only depth search 7 with this first move and it continued that way. Normally Green Light Chess starts immediately the calculation.
After rebooting the machine all was normal again. I repeat that I do not have this with any other engine and I do not have the 1 MB bug up to now, checking every time when I am at home the task manager and task info when an UCI engine is playing. For Green Light Chess it is impossible that the 1 MB bug happens, but all games with Fruit, Dragon, Amyan, WildCat, Ufim, Pepito, Pharaon, Terra, Frenzee and Naum are constantly checked for hash given and all is okay here.
Best Regards
Heinz

[Odd Gunnar Malin]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Odd Gunnar Malin at 04 August 2004 13:45:27:
Als Antwort auf:/In reply to: watching GLC games-for Tim and Odd Gunnar geschrieben von:/posted by: Heinz van Kempen at 04 August 2004 13:06:27:

Hi Tim and Odd Gunnar,
I will use of course the new adapter from Odd Gunnar for all engines as soon as it is available for download. And also the improved Wb2UCI.eng file proposed as soon as I start the new double round robins. Thanks again for your work, Odd Gunnar.
Until then I watch every Green Light Chess game. It just happened again and I saw that Green Light Chess needed one minute and 10 seconds before starting to calculate the first move after the pregiven Nunn position moves obtaining only depth search 7 with this first move and it continued that way. Normally Green Light Chess starts immediately the calculation.
After rebooting the machine all was normal again. I repeat that I do not have this with any other engine and I do not have the 1 MB bug up to now, checking every time when I am at home the task manager and task info when an UCI engine is playing. For Green Light Chess it is impossible that the 1 MB bug happens, but all games with Fruit, Dragon, Amyan, WildCat, Ufim, Pepito, Pharaon, Terra, Frenzee and Naum are constantly checked for hash given and all is okay here.
Best Regards
Heinz

Hi.
You can remove the line 'RunIdle=true' from the .eng file for Glc >= ver. 3.0.
This parametre is for threaded engines that the adapter (or a gui) don't manage to lower the priority. This is done by some gui to give a user a more pleasure feel with the gui, the gui seems faster to operate. For analysis it is almost a must.
From version 3.0 of glc (email from Tim) this engine is not threaded anymore so there is no need for this hack.
My other change was to mask out 'LevelExtend=Strict'.
This is a feature to allow playing against the engine with all possible timecontrol in a GUI, even if it is not supported by winboard. This feature is most interesting for human that use the engine in a training session and probably want to play with the timecontrol he use in normal otb games.
For engine-engine matches this is less interesting and only give possibilities for error.
So for enginematches or playing with an engine on a chessserver (Playchess etc.) I would prefere to use 'LevelExtend=none' (enable from version date 31.dec.2002). For versions of wb2uci with a date >= 18 jul. 2003 this is the default so the line can be masked out and only use one timecontrol (could be repeated).
If you both play human games and engine-engine games you can add LevelExtend to the Visible line so it is selectable from the gui and ev. save the engine as two personalities.
I did run a nunn2 match with glc 3.00 and Crafty 19.15 with 5/g + 10 sec. per move and didn't see anything wrong with Glc in these 40 games (the above corrections to wb2uci was added). The result of the match was 20.5-19.5 in favour of Glc.
So you see, these changes aren't something new, it is Glc who has changed since the version I added as a sample in the text-file following wb2uci.
Also interesting is when you see this hang, are there anything other engines running on your system. Maybe an engine that was not unloaded probably. If you run engines through wb2uci and have a NT based system you can add TerminateHard=true to the option section so the engine are 'killed' if it don't exit by itself with the quit command.
Odd Gunnar

[Heinz van Kempen]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Heinz van Kempen at 04 August 2004 13:57:47:
Als Antwort auf:/In reply to: Re: watching GLC games-for Tim and Odd Gunnar geschrieben von:/posted by: Odd Gunnar Malin at 04 August 2004 13:45:27:

Hi.
You can remove the line 'RunIdle=true' from the .eng file for Glc >= ver. 3.0.
This parametre is for threaded engines that the adapter (or a gui) don't manage to lower the priority. This is done by some gui to give a user a more pleasure feel with the gui, the gui seems faster to operate. For analysis it is almost a must.
From version 3.0 of glc (email from Tim) this engine is not threaded anymore so there is no need for this hack.
My other change was to mask out 'LevelExtend=Strict'.
This is a feature to allow playing against the engine with all possible timecontrol in a GUI, even if it is not supported by winboard. This feature is most interesting for human that use the engine in a training session and probably want to play with the timecontrol he use in normal otb games.
For engine-engine matches this is less interesting and only give possibilities for error.
So for enginematches or playing with an engine on a chessserver (Playchess etc.) I would prefere to use 'LevelExtend=none' (enable from version date 31.dec.2002). For versions of wb2uci with a date >= 18 jul. 2003 this is the default so the line can be masked out and only use one timecontrol (could be repeated).
If you both play human games and engine-engine games you can add LevelExtend to the Visible line so it is selectable from the gui and ev. save the engine as two personalities.
I did run a nunn2 match with glc 3.00 and Crafty 19.15 with 5/g + 10 sec. per move and didn't see anything wrong with Glc in these 40 games (the above corrections to wb2uci was added). The result of the match was 20.5-19.5 in favour of Glc.
So you see, these changes aren't something new, it is Glc who has changed since the version I added as a sample in the text-file following wb2uci.
Also interesting is when you see this hang, are there anything other engines running on your system. Maybe an engine that was not unloaded probably. If you run engines through wb2uci and have a NT based system you can add TerminateHard=true to the option section so the engine are 'killed' if it don't exit by itself with the quit command.
Odd Gunnar

Hi Odd Gunnar,
I already masked out LevelExtend=strict and added LevelExtend=none. I now masked out RunIdle=true, because it might be well possible that this leads to those games, when GLC starts to calculate only after one minute. I will watch now if it is sufficient that no more such games occur.
If it is not in a next step I will add TerminateHard=true, but it very rarely happens that an engine is hanging in running processes being not unloaded. We shall see, thanks for the hints.
Best Regards
Heinz

[Odd Gunnar Malin]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Odd Gunnar Malin at 04 August 2004 14:35:34:
Als Antwort auf:/In reply to: Re: watching GLC games-for Tim and Odd Gunnar geschrieben von:/posted by: Heinz van Kempen at 04 August 2004 13:57:47:

Hi.
You can remove the line 'RunIdle=true' from the .eng file for Glc >= ver. 3.0.
This parametre is for threaded engines that the adapter (or a gui) don't manage to lower the priority. This is done by some gui to give a user a more pleasure feel with the gui, the gui seems faster to operate. For analysis it is almost a must.
From version 3.0 of glc (email from Tim) this engine is not threaded anymore so there is no need for this hack.
My other change was to mask out 'LevelExtend=Strict'.
This is a feature to allow playing against the engine with all possible timecontrol in a GUI, even if it is not supported by winboard. This feature is most interesting for human that use the engine in a training session and probably want to play with the timecontrol he use in normal otb games.
For engine-engine matches this is less interesting and only give possibilities for error.
So for enginematches or playing with an engine on a chessserver (Playchess etc.) I would prefere to use 'LevelExtend=none' (enable from version date 31.dec.2002). For versions of wb2uci with a date >= 18 jul. 2003 this is the default so the line can be masked out and only use one timecontrol (could be repeated).
If you both play human games and engine-engine games you can add LevelExtend to the Visible line so it is selectable from the gui and ev. save the engine as two personalities.
I did run a nunn2 match with glc 3.00 and Crafty 19.15 with 5/g + 10 sec. per move and didn't see anything wrong with Glc in these 40 games (the above corrections to wb2uci was added). The result of the match was 20.5-19.5 in favour of Glc.
So you see, these changes aren't something new, it is Glc who has changed since the version I added as a sample in the text-file following wb2uci.
Also interesting is when you see this hang, are there anything other engines running on your system. Maybe an engine that was not unloaded probably. If you run engines through wb2uci and have a NT based system you can add TerminateHard=true to the option section so the engine are 'killed' if it don't exit by itself with the quit command.
Odd Gunnar

Hi Odd Gunnar,
I already masked out LevelExtend=strict and added LevelExtend=none. I now masked out RunIdle=true, because it might be well possible that this leads to those games, when GLC starts to calculate only after one minute. I will watch now if it is sufficient that no more such games occur.
If it is not in a next step I will add TerminateHard=true, but it very rarely happens that an engine is hanging in running processes being not unloaded. We shall see, thanks for the hints.
Best Regards
Heinz

Hi again.
Just to be sure, what I thought was that another engine (not Glc) was running in the background.
This engine would be running with the normal engine priority, and when Glc start with a lower priority (RunIdle=true) it would almost get no cpu-power.
If this is true other engines suffer too but would run with the same priority as the hunging engine and thereby be running at half speed.
It could also be other things like a DGT board with the old driver (1.3) hooked up to Fritz that could slow down the system, but this you would probably know when it happend.
Odd Gunnar

[Heinz van Kempen]

Geschrieben von:/Posted by: Heinz van Kempen at 04 August 2004 14:46:00:
Als Antwort auf:/In reply to: Re: watching GLC games-for Tim and Odd Gunnar geschrieben von:/posted by: Odd Gunnar Malin at 04 August 2004 14:35:34:

Hi again.
Just to be sure, what I thought was that another engine (not Glc) was running in the background.
This engine would be running with the normal engine priority, and when Glc start with a lower priority (RunIdle=true) it would almost get no cpu-power.
If this is true other engines suffer too but would run with the same priority as the hunging engine and thereby be running at half speed.
It could also be other things like a DGT board with the old driver (1.3) hooked up to Fritz that could slow down the system, but this you would probably know when it happend.
Odd Gunnar

Hi ,
I understand. The window running "processes" is always open here in the background to check for hash and other engines possibly hanging still around there. No DGT board hooked up as long as the tournaments are running.
I will change one thing after the other in the Wb2UCI.eng file to see when we encircled (isolated) the problem. Second step is deleting the RunIdle=true, installing again (just done), third step would be to add TerminateHard=true, especially if there is really one engine still not terminated. Then this command will be applied to this engine, too, of course.
It might last a few days, until it happens again. So we still have to wait and see. After 300 games without probs, maybe we did the right thing before .
Best Regards
Heinz