Thanks, Peter.Peter Berger wrote: ↑Sat Dec 20, 2025 4:47 pm Salut Fabien,
the games were run similar to an ICGA tournament, only without an extra wooden board - so each engine had its own computer, the game was operated manually.
Senpai was setup as an UCI engine in the Fritz 17 GUI.
In the PGN you can see the game from Senpai’s point of view: time used for each move, the expected move and the depth and eval. As you can see, Senpai behaves exactly as you’d expect from an engine that ponders. This includes sometimes moving instantly after the opponent makes the expected move.
I can only assume that Fritz is somehow simulating pondering behaviour, even though I wrote no such code. I would need to think more about it, but I am visualising two missing features:
1) in ponder-on games it makes sense to allocate more time overall, because part of searching will not be counted on our clock.
2) continue searching indefinitely during the opponent's turn, instead of stopping when an internal time limit is reached; we can stop later, when the opponent makes the move.
I am guessing that Fritz isn't doing that (the second one seems impossible, without engine support), and it would explain why time usage is too low.
To fix the symptoms that you are describing, I would need to implement pondering ... I don't think that they can appear in a ponder-off game.
Fabien.