A question to Mark and Larry

[Damir]

Is there some kind of bug in Komodo parameters ?
After making couple of changes in Komodo 10.3 parameters my engine lost on time in 47 moves.
I have tried and talk to Erdo, and he told me he had no time losses, but than again he plays with Default with only thing changed is Contempt Parameter instead of 10 is set to 0.
My question is this, after making additional changes to Komodo parameters, is there the slightest possibility that the engine will crash and run out of time ?

[mjlef]

Is there some kind of bug in Komodo parameters ?
After making couple of changes in Komodo 10.3 parameters my engine lost on time in 47 moves.
I have tried and talk to Erdo, and he told me he had no time losses, but than again he plays with Default with only thing changed is Contempt Parameter instead of 10 is set to 0.
My question is this, after making additional changes to Komodo parameters, is there the slightest possibility that the engine will crash and run out of time ?

Probably best to email us directly so we can go step-by-step through your issue.

Time losses are very rare in our testing on dedicated machines with very low settings. We test at things like game in 5 secs plus 0.05 secs and rarely see a loss. But that is a fast tester on a dedicated machine.

When playing on the internet, you have to deal with lag. The machine/server you are playing could be in another country and the internet does not guarantee a specific delivery time. A slow internet connection can be to blame, or too low settings for the "Overhead ms" parameter. The default is 30 milliseconds. If you have the ability to ping the server you are using, you can set this value to whatever the ping returns plus some margin. Perhaps double the ping value, since packets on the internet vary in delivery time.

We have a second UCI parameter you can try "Minimal Reporting". Default is 0 but you can raise it to a higher value like 10. When this value is above 0, it will suppress sending the full PV to the chess GUI you are using. If you start a UCI chess engine and type go depth 20<Enter> you will see a lot of tex flying by. Minimal Report avoids sending all that stuff until the depth gets higher. It will always send the bestmove command though.

A final related parameter is "Time Usage". A negative number here will make Komodo "save up" for time for the endgame.

Give these a try and see what you find. In general, a game with some kind of increment (like 2 mins + 1 sec) will not run into time trouble (unless the internet is sketchy). While sudden death games are much more likely to be simply run out of time.

If you email us directly we can discuss other causes.

Mark