Computer Player's Timer Not Going Down? | Forums

[TheAshigaru]

I just bought Chessmaster 11 earlier this week off of Steam and so far I have really enjoyed it. With my last Chessmaster program being 7000, it was quite a nice upgrade to say the least.

One rather large bug I have been running into, though, is that when I am playing the computer, it comes back with it's moves instantly in such a way that their clock doesn't even move! In one instance, I had a 10 minute blitz game running against personality "Jeff" and at the game's end, my clock was at zero and his read 9:59, meaning for the entire game he only used 1 second!

Sometimes the clock works perfectly fine, however, and the players take a realistic amount of time. The rating of the players appears to have nothing to do with the bug so I'm really not sure what the issue is. Has anyone else ran into this, or a similar problem?

The only thing I can possibly think the issue being, is that I'm running too powerful a processor? I have an AMD Phenom II 940 quad-core @ 3.00 Ghz. It's reasonable to assume that the computer can make the needed calculations as fast as it does, but it really makes things unfair to the player.

[KHollister]

Many others have also mentioned this behavior; however it's not a bug.

More than likely, the personalities you're playing have a very low search depth, which means they play faster.

[TheAshigaru]

How can this not be some kind of bug? Aren't these personalities supposed to be emulating a human player? I can understand the low search depth but it is almost impossible to actually move the piece and hit the timer in under 1 second, let alone repeat this for 40 moves or so. That would mean that by the end of the game, it would have taken Jeff approximately 1/40th of a second for each move which is really rediculous, you must admit!

[KHollister]

You're being a bit too literal...

Yes, personalities are designed to mimic a human player's quality of play, not timing... keep in mind that this is a computer program.

If you were playing against a much better human player, and he/she moved immediately, would you be upset, and tell them to move more slowly?

As I've mentioned in previous posts, to get every aspect of a chess game against human player, then you'll have to play against another human.