1 and 2 cores at the same time?

[Gábor Szots]

Experimenting with Dorky I have found that even if I set n_cpus=1 in its ini file, WB always forces it to use 2 cores because of the maxCPU setting in WB which is 2 for me.
I don't understand the mechanism of this. I thought that maxCPU gave an upper bound. There may be times when I want one engine to use 1 core, while the other 2 cores. How can I accomplish that if WB sets both of them to 2?

[H.G.Muller]

I am afraid this is not implemented. In WinBoard you can set time-odds to handicap one engine compared to another, but I did not implement 'memory odds' or 'core odds' where you can force engines to run with a different size hash table, or different number of cores.
There exist work-arounds, though, to acheive this. WinBoard allows you to define the 'initString', i.e. the command(s) that are sent to the engine when a new game starts, on a per-engine basis. Normally it is "new\nrandom\n", sending the new and random commands. You can use the option /firstInitString="cores 1\nnew\nrandom\n" (e.g. as Additional Option when starting up WinBoard, or writing it on the engine line in the list of installed engine with the aid of the Edit Engine List menu item.) to have WinBoard always send cores 1 to the engine before new (which then comes after the normal cores command sent by WinBoard, and thus overrules it). Then the first engine should always use only a single core, no matter what you write for the number of cores in the Common Engine dialog.

[Gábor Szots]

Thanks, I am going to try the workaround you suggest.