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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> Re: Something is wrong
        
(Message started by: Fritzlein on Jul 20^th, 2005, 8:09am)

Title: Re: Something is wrong
Post by Fritzlein on Jul 20^th, 2005, 8:09am

Omar, I don't know anything about Linux, but is there some way to make the P3 and P4 bots politely give up resources to other bots, and essentially only run when nothing else is going on? It seems that P3 and P4 are (a) fixed preformance, so it doesn't matter how long they take to move and (b) moving slowly anyway, so a little slower won't hurt, and (c) have super-long time controls, so they won't time out from being self-deprecating.

I think it is a neat experiment to play against P4, but not if it is going to interfere with many other bot-bashing experiments for the next several months.

Title: Re: Something is wrong
Post by omar on Jul 20^th, 2005, 11:18am

There is a 'nice' command in unix which allows setting the priority of a process to a lower level. I'll try that and if it helps.

Title: Re: Something is wrong
Post by Fritzlein on Jul 20^th, 2005, 8:15pm

Apparently the "nice" command is working, because BombP3 has thought for 12 hours and counting on its current move, after never taking more that half an hour up until now. :-)

[edit] The total thinking time for P3 this move was 23:36:31, for whatever reason.

Title: Re: Something is wrong
Post by 99of9 on Jul 20^th, 2005, 9:25pm

But has there really been sufficient other load on the computer to delay P3 for that long?

Title: Re: Something is wrong
Post by omar on Jul 22^nd, 2005, 3:42pm

Actually the process which polls to see if it is the bots turn and starts the bot had died. So I had to restart it. That why it took so long to make the move.

I did some of my own tests with the nice command. Wrote a small program that computes for about 30 seconds. I run the program under nice with the lowest priority setting and it still took about 30 seconds (sometimes even less :-). I tried it at various different times and it didn't seem to make much of a difference. Maybe my program needs to run for a longer time.