lkaufman wrote: I think it's time for CEGT and CCRL to seriously consider switching to increment play. Repeating time control play is obsolete for both humans and computers.
If you're only interested in compiling a rating list with the top or most recent engines, then incremental time controls are fine.
If you want to test a wide diversity of engines, including older engines and weaker engines, using incremental time controls would mean excluding too many because they don't support that form of time control.
Repeating time controls may be obsolete for human play, but no such argument can be applied to engine play as the same factors and reasoning don't apply.
It's entirely a matter of taste.
In my case I prefer repeating time controls because it gives a consistency in use of time and strength of play through all stages of a game.
Nobody is right here and nobody is wrong.
I think that it should be no problem for authors of engines to support fischer time control and many old engines also support fischer time control.
I also think that it may be possible to allow the engine to use different time control if somebody gives an interface to support it and I see no problem in a situation that the time control for engine A is 60+20 when the time control for engine B is 40/40 assuming that the 60+20 is mentioned in the list so you can test all the top engines with 60+20 without deleting the 40/40 entries for these engines.
It may be also interesting if the playing strength of 60+20 is higher or lower than the playing strength of 40/40.
I assume that 60+20 is going to be higher level in the first 40 moves but later 40/40 is higher level and I do not know what gives higher rating.
Modern Times wrote:We don't have any machines that are faster than 40/2.
But of course you don't always need to round. ChessGUI and Winboard for example let you specify minutes and seconds, which is exactly what I do. e.g. 40 moves in 2mins 15secs on this machine.
OK, so CCRL blitz is quite a bit faster than CEGT blitz now, since they use 40/3 even if that is equivalent to 40/6 or more on your "base" hardware. Maybe it's good to have two significantly different levels for "blitz" on the two lists. I guess for CEGT the argument for switching to increment controls is stronger than for CCRL since CEGT already made one major change here.
Modern Times wrote:We don't have any machines that are faster than 40/2.
But of course you don't always need to round. ChessGUI and Winboard for example let you specify minutes and seconds, which is exactly what I do. e.g. 40 moves in 2mins 15secs on this machine.
OK, so CCRL blitz is quite a bit faster than CEGT blitz now, since they use 40/3 even if that is equivalent to 40/6 or more on your "base" hardware. Maybe it's good to have two significantly different levels for "blitz" on the two lists. I guess for CEGT the argument for switching to increment controls is stronger than for CCRL since CEGT already made one major change here.
I really don't think that you should be strongly advocating for any testing group to switch their conditions to what your preferences are.
The conditions that each group use are entirely their own business.
Besides, diversity is good.
lkaufman wrote:
OK, so CCRL blitz is quite a bit faster than CEGT blitz now, since they use 40/3 even if that is equivalent to 40/6 or more on your "base" hardware. Maybe it's good to have two significantly different levels for "blitz" on the two lists. I guess for CEGT the argument for switching to increment controls is stronger than for CCRL since CEGT already made one major change here.
Yes CCRL blitz will be faster but not massively so. If CEGT use 40/3 instead of an adjusted 40/2 that is 50% more time the engines are getting than they should be. And is it all their machines or just some of them ? But yes, if we had two significantly different levels of blitz that would be interesting.
Modern Times wrote:We don't have any machines that are faster than 40/2.
But of course you don't always need to round. ChessGUI and Winboard for example let you specify minutes and seconds, which is exactly what I do. e.g. 40 moves in 2mins 15secs on this machine.
OK, so CCRL blitz is quite a bit faster than CEGT blitz now, since they use 40/3 even if that is equivalent to 40/6 or more on your "base" hardware. Maybe it's good to have two significantly different levels for "blitz" on the two lists. I guess for CEGT the argument for switching to increment controls is stronger than for CCRL since CEGT already made one major change here.
I really don't think that you should be strongly advocating for any testing group to switch their conditions to what your preferences are.
The conditions that each group use are entirely their own business.
Besides, diversity is good.
I agree diversity is good. I'm just pointing out that you could make considerably better use of your limited resources by increment testing. But of course your present method of testing remains valid.
Graham Banks wrote:
If you want to test a wide diversity of engines, including older engines and weaker engines, using incremental time controls would mean excluding too many because they don't support that form of time control.
I had a few with ponder problems in the beginning. Guess what happened?
As soon as the rating list play increment the authors have to and will adapt. I do not see ANY problem here!
Graham Banks wrote:
If you want to test a wide diversity of engines, including older engines and weaker engines, using incremental time controls would mean excluding too many because they don't support that form of time control.
I had a few with ponder problems in the beginning. Guess what happened?
As soon as the rating list play increment the authors have to and will adapt. I do not see ANY problem here!
Bye
Ingo
You do a great job Ingo, but you need to be careful that your list doesn't become the Ipontificate list.
There is no right or wrong way. It is entirely a matter of preference.
lkaufman wrote: OK, so CCRL blitz is quite a bit faster than CEGT blitz now, since they use 40/3 even if that is equivalent to 40/6 or more on your "base" hardware.
40/3' is a bottom line resp. a value we will not fall below even if we could, and we could, believe me... . On my AMD-Quads I could play at least 40/2':30'' due to our benchmark, Gerhards i5 are even faster. But Gerhard and me agreed not to fall below 40/3. We don't like time controls like 40/1'30" or less which would be played on an actual i7. And hardware is getting faster and faster, so in the near future we could play 40/0':30". Never ever!
But we would play more than 40/3 if a slower PC would be used, but IIRC there is no slower one available any more.
.....
I guess for CEGT the argument for switching to increment controls is stronger than for CCRL since CEGT already made one major change here.
I thought about creating a new (additional) list with Fischer time (3'+2" was my favourite) but I dropped the project (for now!) because we decided to build up our 40/20 with Permanent Brain = ON which I considered to be more important.
Wolfgang wrote:We don't like time controls like 40/1'30" or less which would be played on an actual i7. And hardware is getting faster and faster, so in the near future we could play 40/0':30". Never ever!
We just don't have that problem thankfully, becuase we don't have machines fast enough. Nothing we have gets below 40/2.
I'm completely happy with 40/2 but if we did get machines faster than that I think we would have to think what to do. Hopefully those machines would be used for 40/40 and slower machines for blitz. That would be the best use of resource. It is an issue we will have to confront eventually.
lkaufman wrote: I think it's time for CEGT and CCRL to seriously consider switching to increment play. Repeating time control play is obsolete for both humans and computers.
Ahhh ... !!! Repeating time controls are played because analog clocks could not add increments. Nowadays it a a crusted tradition which is played because people in chess clubs play it because when they entered the club it was played like this ... it as a bad habit which is hard to wipe out!
Thx for your statement
Ingo
Nonsense, there is nothing crusted.
40/4 repeated is a timecontrol among others, no more, no less !
. On my AMD-Quads I could play at least 40/2':30'' due to our benchmark, Gerhards i5 are even faster. But Gerhard and me agreed not to fall below 40/3. We don't like time controls like 40/1'30" or less which would be played on an actual i7. And hardware is getting faster and faster, so in the near future we could play 40/0':30". Never ever! 