
			Known Issues


1. Fischerle's ponder mode, which used to work perfectly under Arena 3.0,
does not seem to work properly under Arena 3.5, nor does it work in
some alternative GUIs such as ChessGUI. This seems to be due to a UCI
synchronization issue, but -- unfortunately -- the full reasons behind
this are yet unknown.

2. Fischerle possesses a comparatively big memory footprint, which is
chiefly due to the relatively large number of bit masks employed for
the configuration testings based on the underlying rotated bitboard
position representation. Hence, if an insufficient amount of physical
memory is supplied, paging will occur, resulting in a sharp decline
of Fischerle's performance (node throughput). Thus, as a prerequisite
of obtaining meaningful engine test results, Fischerle should be run
in an environment that adequately cares for its memory requirement,
which, of course, depends as well partly upon the assigned hash table
size. If, e. g., the hash table space is set to 256 MB, Fischerle should
be fine with a physical memory assignment of  1400 MB -- see the "-Xms"
and "-Xmx" parameters in the .bat startup command.

3. Since Fischerle is a Java chess engine, its performance depends as
well upon the particular Java implementation (JVM) installed on the
evaluation machine. It has been observed that Fischerle's actual
performance significantly varies depending upon the particular
evaluation environment. Presumably, this issue can not be completely
eliminated; at least, one should try to do one's best to employ the
Java implementation best suited for the particular test platform,
and -- of course -- to keep it up to date, since the latest version
typically constitutes the most efficient one. 


Thus, if you observe a sharp drop in performance after a switch to
another testing system, please check whether Fischerle yet obtains
the physical memory it requires, and whether this other computer
runs an up-to-date Java implementation that is best suited to the
particular system environment. This proves to be vital for obtaining
meaningful test results!


Roland		           Frankfurt am Main, March 25th, 2016

roland@stuckardt.de
www.stuckardt.de/index.php/schachengine-fischerle.html
