Re: Question about version 5.05.

[Simon Waters]

"Sternbach, William [IT]" wrote:
> 
> I hope its ok if I ask you what type of computer you have?
> 
> I have a 1.5 year old Compaq Deskpro Intel Pentium III 733 MHZ PC
> (with fast 133 MHZ bus and memory) with 384 MB of RAM and a 9.5 Gig hard
> drive
> running Windows 2000 Professional.

It is an Cyrix 166Mhz processor, 128Mb of memory, running
GNU/Linux (of course).

> So my "Intel Pentium III 733 MHZ" PC is quite slow compared to the latest
> computers.

Hell your new computer has almost caught up with the ones I was
using in 1992, but I've since quit working with supercomputers
(they never let me play chess on them anyway).

> If I were a major member of the chess programming team for gnu chess,
> my main consideration would be to make gnuchess play as strong a game of
> chess as possible, possibly in the same category as deeper blue
> (although this goal may not be achievable).

Realistically probably not on current hardware, good software
makes up for a lot, but Deeper Blue was something else.

However I'm pretty sure we can push your old 166MHz pentium to
near Grandmaster level fairly soon, assuming it has oodles of
RAM.

> I find gnuchess at poly 8 a very good opponent, but I need to increase it to
> Poly 11
> in order for it to be impossible for me to beat.

I don't understand why you refer to "poly" all the time, if you
mean you set the depth to restrict it's strength, that is fine,
but we usually use timed games. Artifically limiting depth is
generally not a good way of restricting chess computers.

> Since I have 384 MB of Ram,
> Please give me instructions on how to increase the hash table or make any
> other
> adjustments to book size to increase the strength of the computer opponent.

You need to pass a string "hashsize NNNN" where NNNN is suitably
large to fill up all your free RAM. On 384Mb machine "hashsize
2000000" should do the job at a guess, but if it your disk
starts thrashing you've overdone it, and run out of RAM.

How you pass this string depends on the interface, with Winboard
you need to define an appropriate "/initString" option, as
explained in the help file.