Questions about time controls

[Heinz van Kempen]

Hi all ,

so far we played with 40/40 repeated in AEGT, but votings are going that way that we will change either to time control

a) 40/40 + 40/40 + 40 minutes for the rest

or

b) 40/40 + 40 minutes for the rest

The reasons are that we always have a lot of games with 150, 200 moves or more that are dead drawn (bishop of opposite colours, closed positions with closed pawn chains where nothing really happens anymore) and that for this games three or four more could be played with average length.

Another consideration is that there are no human tournaments with an everytime repeated time control and we mostly have for example 40/2hours and 30 minutes for the rest. So those repeated time controls are not very realistic.

My question is if there will be engines that will have problems with time controls a and b above and if we should introduce the new time control with AEGT 3 (deadline December, 28th) or only with AEGT 4 (if there will be such).

Best Regards
Heinz

[Richard Pijl]

My question is if there will be engines that will have problems with time controls a and b above and if we should introduce the new time control with AEGT 3 (deadline December, 28th) or only with AEGT 4 (if there will be such).

The Baron has no problem with these time controls. It properly saves time for the next portion. This does require the extended 'level' command though. I'm not sure if all GUI's implemented that correctly for winboard engines. Winboard does not. The only GUI I've tested it with so far is Arena.

It might be a good idea to do some test tournaments first, with the intended GUI before using it with engines like the Baron. The Baron does not accept another level command to change the time control during the game as it messes up the time management.

Richard.

[Dan Honeycutt]

Hi Heinz:

Bruja only supports the Winboard standard:

Code: Select all

The command to set a conventional time control looks like this:

  level 40 5 0
  level 40 0:30 0

The 40 means that there are 40 moves per time control. The 5 means there are 5 minutes in the control. In the second example, the 0:30 means there are 30 seconds. The final 0 means that we are in conventional clock mode.

The command to set an incremental time control looks like this:

  level 0 2 12

Here the 0 means "play the whole game in this time control period", the 2 means "base=2 minutes", and the 12 means "inc=12 seconds". As in conventional clock mode, the second argument to level can be in minutes and seconds.

If the gui sent a "level 40 40 0" at the start then sent "level 0 40 0" after move 40 or 80 Bruja should be OK (will probably play faster than it should because its going to set a time target for a whole game rather than just an endgame), but I've never tested this.

Dan H.

[Dan Honeycutt]

This does require the extended 'level' command though.

Hi Richard:
What is the extended level command? Looks like something I may need to work on if AEGT goes with the new time controls.

Thanks
Dan H.

[Richard Pijl]

What is the extended level command? Looks like something I may need to work on if AEGT goes with the new time controls.

With the extended level command you'll get multiple time controls at once, eg level 40 40 0 0 40 0
meaning 40 moves in 40 minutes followed by 40 minutes for the remainder of the game.
You can get several triplets, but most GUI's do not support more than three.
Richard.