Time Trouble (again)

During the tuning process of the engine I realized that some games that were played during the tuning are lost on time. The games are played very fast, e.g. 10 moves within 1 second, so an occasional loss on time is not uncommon. But after I measured it, the rate was between 15% and 20% time losses, which is much to high.

I thought my time management module was working correctly. It should adapt to fast time controls and prevent time losses, but it did not. I decided to have a look at it and spotted the problem almost instantly.

The second line was reading hardLimit = softLimit causing the trouble

The hard limit is the time that the search has to stop no matter what to prevent a time loss. The soft limit is a recommendation for the search but can be extended. There is a final check that the soft limit can never be bigger than the hard limit, but unfortunately I messed up the order. Instead of lowering the soft limit I extended the hard limit.

Stupid me. 

Fixed, tested and the time loss percentage dropped to 0%.

PS.: Another GA run is almost done, so I will soon have enough samples to check how much the whole stuff is worth in terms of ELO points.