carldaman wrote:Hi Ray, glad a serious tester has noticed this as well. I don't mean to pick on Arena, as I like the software, which came free, to boot , but some of the glitches can really get in the way of good testing.
My comments were meant as constructive criticism. Sorry if I was not aware of recent work on Arena.
Regards,
CL
The trick I think is to set the hash size in each engine's UCI parameters, because Arena's global UCI setting does not always work.
A couple of CCRL testers use Arena extensively, they don't have the issue, and I think this is what they have done to get around it.
The only reason why it does not always work has to do with the engines themselves. Arena sends 'setoption name Hash value [MB]', where [MB] would be the amount of hash chosen. Arena 3 also will send 'memory [MB]' for WB engines. But not all engines allow the hash to be changed.
Also, Hash is not an UCI parameter that is avaliable in the Configuration window, probably because it is configured globally.
carldaman wrote:Hi Ray, glad a serious tester has noticed this as well. I don't mean to pick on Arena, as I like the software, which came free, to boot , but some of the glitches can really get in the way of good testing.
My comments were meant as constructive criticism. Sorry if I was not aware of recent work on Arena.
Regards,
CL
The trick I think is to set the hash size in each engine's UCI parameters, because Arena's global UCI setting does not always work.
A couple of CCRL testers use Arena extensively, they don't have the issue, and I think this is what they have done to get around it.
It's been a while since I used Arena, but from memory you need to rightclick in the engine pane after installing the engine, and set the parameters there. Same as with Shredder GUI if I recall correctly.
I do not know about any version before v2.0.1. However, from v2.0.1 on you start the engine, right click in the area of the screen where its PV information would be displayed, and left click on 'Configure [engine name]'.
Michael, Arena is great and extremely programmer friendly and yet there is one thing that bothers me but perhaps you know the answer, here is my question: The default setting:
Engine Tournament -> Start/Quit -> Restart Arena after xx games
is set to 20.
And such an option + default setting is odd and suspicious as my immediate thought a programmer only would add such an option if his artwork is facing memory leaks, or even worse causes a crash sometimes.
Do you remember why this has been done?
There are other possibilities of course, maybe he just liked the option and Arena is fine.
What have you experienced, Sam? Maybe I am not on the same page as everybody else. I do not use Arena 3, so I do not know if there exists a problem with that version. But I have used v2.0.1 for almost 4 years (I believe it was released in January 2009). I have not experienced a hash problem that was due to Arena 2.0.1.
Adam Hair wrote:
Also, Hash is not an UCI parameter that is avaliable in the Configuration window, probably because it is configured globally.
I believe it works as follows:
UCI Hash is available to the user unless
'Engines'
'Manage'
'UCI'
'Common hashtable size'
is checked
That is exactly how it works to set it globally. So, if the user chose 256 MB for all UCI engines, Arena sends the command 'setoption name Hash value 256' to each UCI engine upon start up.
, but some of the glitches can really get in the way of good testing.
