Check out Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, our featured variant for May, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Sep 18, 2009 02:53 PM EDT:
That depends on how you define reasonable. I guess it would only reduce its strength by about 150 Elo compared to non-extreme time controls of the same average time per move. (Of course the opponents would likely also suffer, and it is difficult to predict if they would suffer more or less.) That is at least more reasonable than reducing its strength by 2500 Elo through making it search 1 ply only.

The reason is that engines function optimally if they can allocate time to those moves where it is needed. This results in a strongly variable time per move: there are natural points where they could stop, and time spent after that is largely wasted, until you go all the way to the next point where to stop. Unless they discover that they are really in trouble, i.e. the move they focused on so far suddenly turns sour at larger depth. Then it pays to allow them extra time until they found at least a reasonale alternative. After all, time is only a factor if you plan to fight on. So playing a move that you know to be immediately losing just to save time is never an attractive proposition.

By harrassing the engine through facing it with a time control on every move, you largely make sensible time management impossible. In particular, Joker calculates its nominal search time as T/(N+3), where T is the remaining time on its clock, N is the number of moves it still has to do in that time. So it keeps 3 moves worth of time reserve to be able to solve inadvertant trouble on the last move before the TC. But if N=1 always, this would make it do the initial moves very fast.

I would advice against trying extreme time controls, but use the engines in modes for which they are designed, rather than see how much you can stress them before they break. At least, I assume you are interested in how well they play Chess. If you put two grand masters to a game where someone is constantly knocking them over the head with a pillow, and hosing them down with a fire hose... Well, they might be able to complete the game, but who wins is likely to reflect other properties than their skill at chess. Just play game/time, game + small increment per time or 40 moves/time. So 15+0, 10+5 or 40/10 would be good controls to test them at (i.e. 15 min sudden death, 10 min + 5 sec/move or 40 moves / 10 min). Trying extremes only tells you something about the robustness of their time management outside the range of its design parameters, and has little to do with chess.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Schoolbook

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.