🚀 go-pugleaf

>I ran a match at 60 moves in one minute this morning to make sure I
>hadn't broken something.  Crafty won 7, drew 1.  I will play more
>later.
>
>the very first thing that comes to mind is, was this experimental
>match set up properly?  IE it was run on one machine.  Was gnuchessx
>put in "easy" mode to match the ponder=off in crafty?  Did you confirm
>that only one was running at a time?  IE in linux, while my match was
>running I used "top" to be sure that I had only one cpu-bound process
>at a time.

No, this match wasn't set up properly -- ponder=off and easy mode
looked too difficult to bother with -- but I don't think that should
bias the results towards gnuchessx. I did run top during a test game
and found both programs were receiving about 49% of the CPU whoever's
move it was, so this isn't the explanation.

One thing that did make a difference is the broken results keeping by
xboard 3.6.2. Because of that the scoreline reported in my original
post was simply wrong. I examined the games and found the correct
result to be 11-7 in Crafty's favor!

This still seemed to be more level than I would have expected. I
guessed that Crafty might be hurt by a too large hash table, causing
it to swap. So I rematched the two programs with hash=12M (vice
16M). After 10 games Crafty scored 1 1 0 = = 1 1 1 1 = : 7.5/10.
(gnuchessx's lack of chess knowledge made some of the games painful to
watch -- imagine K+R dancing with k+r for 50 moves!).

However, I made a disturbing discovery which may invalidate even this
result: gnuchessx may lose on time and crafty does not claim! is this
a known problem in crafty or xboard?

-- 
		  People who like this sort of thing
       	      will find this the sort of thing they like.
Tim J.Benham					timben@interact.net.au