Cute Chess 1.2.0 question

[Jouni]

I use GUI. If I set Time per move = 2s all games end after some 10 moves! Why??

[sarona]

Same problem here, too.

I increased the margin to 7 milliseconds (ms) in Time Controls and the problem ended for me. You might be able to reduce the margin even lower. I just tried 7 ms.

Maybe it is GUI lag?

[Guenther]

I use GUI. If I set Time per move = 2s all games end after some 10 moves! Why??

1. No sane person plays with exact fixed time per single! move (tc 1/x), quite some programs will try to use all this time up to 0-1ms
and depending on your clock cycle, which might be 1-16ms you beg for time losses.

2. If that nonsense tc really is desired change either the move overhead (uci option if available for the specific program) and/or the time margin (GUI).

3. Turn animation off...

4. Every process/task using more than a tiny bit of cpu time might still give you headaches for this tc

[Jouni]

Yes margin 7ms helps. But clear bug this is.

[RubiChess]

Yes margin 7ms helps. But clear bug this is.

If you call it a bug then it is not in cutechess.
It is Stockfish that doesn't use his move overhead (= 10ms default) when it gets a 'go movetime ...' command.
See
https://github.com/official-stockfish/S ... .cpp#L1838
and the following line.

So the GUI needs to correct that missing overhead handling to avoid time forfeit.
But people my argue that 'go movetime' is not for playing games but for running a constant time on analyzing some positions and time forfeit should be no issue.

Regards, Andreas

[Jouni]

I check from log, that SF with 1s movetime uses 1001 or 1002 ms. And Cute Chess flags it . If I have made GUI it will accept 1,5 seconds. Flagging with movetime is not reasonable!

[RubiChess]

Flagging with movetime is not reasonable!

That is your opinion. Developers of Cutechess have a different opinion and I can agree with them. Why should exceeding movetime be allowed while exceeding time/inc is not allowed?
But you already have the solution: Cutechess developers offer you to use the TIMEMARGIN parameter to avoid flagging engines.

Regards, Andreas