Friday, March 16, 2012

Testing Control Change

I am changing my time control to 10' + 10" increment (10 minutes per game + 10 seconds per move) and starting a new ratings database. I am also giving each engine 64 MBs of endgame cache, instead of 32. I think this is a respectable time control and is long enough to produce quality games. The standard benchmark for other chess engine test groups is based on an AMD X2 4600+ @ 2.4 GHz. My machine benchmarks almost twice as fast as that, using Crafty Bench 19.17. My computer processes the same amount of data in 40/21 as a "standard" PC does in 40/40. The total thinking time each engine of mine will have in a typical 80-move game is 2,800 seconds, or about 47 minutes. If I were to participate in a 40/40 list, my computer's thinking time would be half of that, which is 21 minutes for 40 moves (or 42 minutes for 80 moves). Forty-two minutes = 2,520 seconds, which is still  about 300 seconds less than the 2,800 seconds my engines will think in 80 moves. If any game goes beyond 80 moves, the quality should not suffer much: There is still the left-over 300 seconds plus 10 seconds per move, which, usually in an endgame, is plenty of time as to not affect game quality. Also, ponder is on, so it could be as much as 20 seconds/move thinking time.