Thursday, January 17, 2008

Heavyweight match

I just finished running an engine match between the 64-bit versions of Cake and KingsRow. Cake managed a narrow win, but what makes even happier is that the entire engine match ran without problems, i.e. CB64 and Cake64 and KingsRow64 are all stable enough to run for 12 hours without any errors. I will probably publish the 64-bit versions in a couple of weeks.

As an aside, I got so annoyed with Windows Vista UAC (user account control) popping up TWO message boxes to confirm when I just want to rename a file that I ended up disabling UAC. I really wonder what the MS guys were thinking when they invented this feature. One message box for renaming a file would already be a huge PITA, but two... I guess the only people who don't disable UAC are those who don't know how to do it!

Some more Vista madness: I also noticed that by default my system was set to defragment its harddisk daily, run a full virus check daily, and run the pretty much useless Windows Defender. My system (a QuadCore with 4GB RAM) used to access the harddisk permanently for about 15-30 minutes after the system start. With all this stuff disabled, it is much better. In my quest for energy efficiency, I bought an 80+ power supply (80plus.org), which is not only energy efficient but also very silent (it only generates little heat and thus needs less ventilation than a standard power supply). However, with a loudish harddisk I didn't have any benefit of that. Now I do :-)

5 comments:

Mark said...

Looking forward to your publishing the result and match settings more clearly as well as the x64 version.
Thanks!

Eli said...

Yahoo Checkers is the place to be Mr. Fierz. I greatly respect your work :)

Nelson Castillo said...

Good :) I wonder what are your thoughts on checkers programming (8x8) now that it is solved. I guess it is still fun :)

Martin Fierz said...

Hola Nelson!

8x8 checkers is solved - but what good is the Chinook proof to anybody who has an interest in the game? If you want to analyze your games and find mistakes, then it is of no use at all, while strong checkers engines are very helpful. Nevertheless, I admit that I am not very motivated to continue programming checkers, but that has nothing to do with the Chinook proof - rather with my personal situation and the fact that programs such as Cake are virtually unbeatable these days...

Nelson Castillo said...

Thanks a lot for your reply. Watching computers play could be a nice motivation to improve CB, until all the games are draws with the best engines (and all are wins with the weaker ones).