Question about the "level" command of the Xboard p

[Tom Likens]

I've been working on my program's time management and I've bumped into something
using Fischer time controls and millisecond increments. I've been running very fast games
with a time control 1 sec.+ 0.1 sec. For this time setting the level command sent
to the engine is:

level 0 1 0

Since the first argument is 0 that tells me I'm playing with a time increment, but the time
increment is zero. The problem is that I'd like to do something "clever" with the time
increment in my time management routine and I need to know the amount of the increment,
(it's really 10 centiseconds, in xboard parlance).

Currently, in these cases I'm assuming 100 ms for the increment, but that isn't optimal
if it's really 500 ms, which is popular subsecond increment. I know this seems pedantic,
but it's bothering the perfectionist in me. Hopefully, I'm missing something simple.

regards,
--tom

[hgm]

Well, for me the debug file contains:

Code: Select all

569 >first : level 0 1 0.1

when I specify -inc 0.1 on the command line. Which version are you talking about?

[Tom Likens]

Well, for me the debug file contains:

Code: Select all

569 >first : level 0 1 0.1

when I specify -inc 0.1 on the command line. Which version are you talking about?

Hello H.G.,

I should have been a bit clearer (precision is everything in life). I'm running into this problem
with cutechess-cli. Xboard 4.5.3 seems to handle this OK. I haven't checked it yet under
Arena 3.0 or any other GUI, (next on my list).

BTW, Did you add this to Xboard? I seem to recall that older versions set the increment to 0,
(I need to dig up and test version 4.2.6 to see if that is true).

regards,
--tom

[hgm]

Well, 4.2.6 is from 1999 or thereabouts. But yes, I added that about a year ago, I think.

[Tom Likens]

Yes, 4.2.6 is "paleolithic", but occasionally it's fun to play with the older version of things.
If for no other reason then to marvel at how primitive things were before.

I'm sure this has already been said many times, but thank you for all the hard work on
xboard. You've added some nice features that used to only exist in the Winboard fork.
When things settle down I intend to experiment with your GTK alpha port.

--tom

[hgm]

That would be nice; we can always use testers!

The GTK version seems to work quite well now on my Ubuntu 10.04. Except for accelerator keys almost everything is implemented. But it would be important to see how it does on other systems.

[Tom Likens]

That's the least I can give back. I'm running Linux Mint 13, so it's definitely a few
generations removed from 10.04. I should be able to run things early next week.
I'll post something when I have some results, (if nothing else just to let you know
that it works).

--tom

[Tom Likens]

H.G.,

One thing I have noticed, even with version 4.5.3, is that the time control in the PGN file is written as:

[TimeControl "1+0"]

Shouldn't this really be:

[TimeControl "1+0.1"]

regards,
--tom

[hgm]

Oh, I guess I did not fix it there. Thx for pointing it out.