Manual de Chess King 2015 | Page 97

PART 1 • When it comes to chess engine analysis, longer is better Players will occasionally ask me, “I play a lot of chess. Wouldn't it be better for an engine to analyze all of my games quickly than just a few of them at greater length?” I don't necessarily agree with that, but it really depends on what goes on in your games (and the previous section above on prioritizing the games you select for analysis talks a bit about this). If you lose a lot of games, but can easily see afterward why and how you lost most of them, then there's really no point to having an engine analyze them. But if you're losing a lot of times with no clue as to how the losses happen, then you might be better off analyzing more games at shorter time settings. In general, though, for most of us who are experienced players I recommend having your chess engine analyze games at greater length. A longer analysis time means a deeper search for each move; the engine will evaluate more positions farther ahead, and thus give you back better suggestions and evaluations. As for specific time settings, that's going to be a matter of trial and error on your part; any specific recommendations I'd give could likely be obsolete by the time this book sees print. It will depend on both your hardware (number of cores or processors and their speed) and your software chess engine (primarily whether it supports the use of multiple cores or processors, but also the inherent search speed of the engine as determined by the number of factors contained in its algorithm). It's not unreasonable to expect a chess engine to take one to two hours to perform a decent analysis of the average game. A lot of people like to have their chess engine analyze games while they're away from the computer, for example while they're asleep, so that the computer will devote its full resources to the analysis task. On the other hand, if you have a multi-core or multi-processor machine and a chess engine which uses a single processor, you could have your chess engine analyze a game “in the background” while you're using your computer for other tasks. Even if you have a single-processor computer, but have a chess engine which lets you set a specific search depth instead of a “time per move” setting, you could set the depth for “19” (for example) and let the chess engine run for as long as it takes to reach that depth while you're using your computer for other tasks (but if such is the case, it's probably best to just let the chess engine have your computer and do a “while you sleep” analysis instead). 97 chessking.com