Nice that someone also asks the question of sense:)
The triggers are no less than Google/DeepMind and above all Tord Romstad. It's about the legendary Stockfish/Alpha Zero match. You probably know the well-known " orangutan apple " statement from the Stockfish co-author in which he is very critical about the match. Here is the essential quotation that this is about:
Now I ask:The match results by themselves are not particularly meaningful because of the rather strange choice of time controls and Stockfish parameter settings: The games were played at a fixed time of 1 minute/move, which means that Stockfish has no use of its time management heuristics (lot of effort has been put into making Stockfish identify critical points in the game and decide when to spend some extra time on a move; at a fixed time per move, the strength will suffer significantly).
What could this quote have to do with someone looking for a GUI with which a match is possible, for example Stockfish playing 1mov/1min against Stockfisch 40/40?
Generalized, I would like to test to what extent different time management has an effect on playing strength, because time controls have not only a quantitative aspect but also a qualitative one.
However, unfortunately, the latest state of play is that this GUI does not yet exist. Fritz, Arena, Aquarium etc. are out of the game, simply because with two engines only tournament mode or fixed time can be adjusted differently.
I'm on Cutechess right now, studying the Cli-Commands. Oh dear, it says, "st=N set the time limit for each move to N seconds". This option can't be used in combination with "tc". So exactly the same as in all GUIs.
Maybe only works with two computers, connected by cable or in a network. Or is there still a software solution?
But it's only this time mode that matters, because that's exactly what was used in the Stockfish-AlphaZero match.It is dramatically different from all the others no matter if Tournament, Blitz, Rapid, with or without increment. These TCs have in common that the engine determines on which moves it takes more or less time. The more intelligent this selection, the deeper the engine calculates for the relevant moves and the stronger it is. With fixed move time, the engine can only use the time-heuristics to a very limited extent, because the cut comes much earlier in the case of moves, that would be calculated deeper in Tournament or Rapid mode. This justifies the hypothesis that the modus "time per single move" is significantly weaker. A match 1min/move vs. 40/40 should be significantly in favor of tournament mode. Replace single move mode with another mode? Okay, with what? I see no alternative to it. You can forget all that mentioned handicap acrobatics.