Hi chess friends,

Obviously the Glasgow program is a dear one for many, and is especially put under spotlights (with some question marks!) since the Mephisto Phoenix availability.

A new field has been opened for experiments, thanks to the huge acceleration the Mephisto Phoenix can provide.

I own no chess computer running the Glasgow program, but I can run Franz's awesome CB-Emu suite, to get an accurate emulation (yes, it deserves being named a suite rather than a program).

Several brilliant assets of CB-Emu facilitate testing activities: the ability to speed-up the run (within the performance limits of your host PC), the MessChess plugin layer, and the recently added ability to setup positions and play additional moves using referee mode (where available at the chess computer side, of course).

And the Mephisto IIIS Glasgow is available, with three versions: 7.2Mhz to reproduce an original 68000 CPU throttled with wait states, 12Mhz for the fast 68000 without wait states, and 130Mhz to provide a flavor of the Phoenix Revelation II performance.

My 10 years old laptop cannot sustain the 130Mhz version, but can run both original versions with 500% speed. The Info-2 mode of the chess computer displays the thinking time used, so I can set level-9 (analysis) and stop the thinking process on time. Then I can display the score using Info-1.

OK, all the required tools are available to enable running the Khmelnitsky test!

Next step has been to select versions, and associated speed. Of course, both original devices must enter the test, of course the new Mephisto Phoenix as well. I wanted also an intermediate version, significantly faster than the original, but not too much as this would widely extend the time required to run the test. I chose the Phoenix Revelation version (38Mhz equivalent).

For speed scaling, I leveraged the data provided by Egbert:
How does it translate into timing for my test? As some may know I use 3 minutes thinking time per position in the test; and if a move per move evaluation is needed, I use 1 minute per move. It is just a conventional choice of mine, but as I run the KT with several chess computers, I stick to it to enable cross-comparisons under the very same conditions. Don't change the measuring tool, as a golden rule!

I so let the emulator think 3mn per position / 1mn per move for both original IIIS Glasgow devices (7.2 and 12Mhz). The elapsed time to reach it is thus 36s / 12s thanks to the 5 times speed-up.

For the ~38Mz Revelation version, the allowed thinking time raises to 9mn30s per position / 3mn10s per move using the 12Mhz original emulation. That's already a lot of time, but the 500% speed reduces the elapsed to 1mn54s / 38s.

Last but not least, the Mephisto Phoenix (480Mhz equivalent) requires 2h thinking time per position (to mitigate the 12Mhz actual run) and 40mn per move. Despite the emulator speed-up, that is 24mn elapsed per position, and 8mn per move.

At this stage you should be aware of:
1) Ruud has been very successful in speeding up the program, hats off!
2) the KT is going to require a bit of time and efforts, to complete.

I kicked-off the the test a week ago, and I just reached 40%. So, for completeness + data graphs to be produced with a minimal analysis, expect a couple of weeks delay.

So yes, that is a teaser!
mit freundlichen Grußen,
Eric