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).
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