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H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Sep 18, 2016 11:29 AM UTC:

I looked into the timing problem, and it turns out that Fairy-Max' time management was indeed poorly adapted to such big games. Being a rather minimalistic engine, Fairy-Max has a very course algorithm for time management: it can only stop thinking after completing a depth iteration. So it must take the decision if it will try to go one ply deeper based on the time spent so far, and an expectation based on that for the duration of the next iteration. But with larger boards and more pieces the factor with which the tree size, and thus time use, grows with each ply increases. So it will be too optimistic in starting new iterations, and on the average use too much time.

The minimal thinking time on a move already contained a factor (0.6 - 0.06*(boardWidth - 8)), to speed up thinking by 20% in Capablanca Chess. But I had forgotten to also add such a correction factor for the board height, when in version 5.0 I finally made that adjustable too. So now I added an additional factor (1 - 0.1*(boardHeight - 8)), which in the case of Apothecary would give another 20% speedup.

Now Apothecary not only has larger board, but also a rather large number of pieces, because it does not only fill the first rank with pieces. I therefore introduced yet another factor in the time-per-move calculation, based on total material. In Chess, the point count M for that is initially 40 (P=0, N,B=2, R=3, Q=6). I now included a factor 50/(M+20). Unlike the other factors, this also does alter the time allocation in orthodox Chess, by increasing thinking time in the end-game at the expenseo of the opening. This might be good, because Fairy-Max was always speeding upin the end-game, but I will have to test it to make sure. In any case, it does speed up thinking in Apothecary even further.

With these changes, Fairy-Max does not seem to forfeit on time so often anymore, in Apothecary. I uploaded the new version (called 5.0b3) to the same link as before (append ?t=2 to the URL!).


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