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billforsternz / retro-sargon

This is a project to bring the code from the book "Sargon a computer chess program" back to life in the modern era
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Engine won't stop calculating #3

Open asdfjkl opened 3 years ago

asdfjkl commented 3 years ago

There seems to be no default limit for the search depth, which causes unexpected behaviour in some GUIs. How to reproduce:

One expects the engine to return after some time, but in this case, go movetime 1000 acts like go infinite, which is kind of unexpected.

I understand that it's difficult to map the behaviour of this old engine to UCI, but I guess some kind of default cutoff would be helpful...

billforsternz commented 3 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out Dominik. You are quite correct of course. The problem is that I wasn't aware of the movetime parameter and so I don't look for it. I am probably guilty of only using the parts of the UCI spec that I am familiar with, and never rereading it to check whether I am missing anything important. I suppose this is more significant when working on UCI servers (engines) as opposed to my normal work in UCI clients (GUIs)!

It won't be difficult to fix this problem, I hope I can get to it reasonably soon.