"All of your threads will be destroyed after 5 seconds though, so a "pondering" thread that would think during the opponents five seconds is not allowed or possible under our system."
dammit.
but about this 5 seconds. what kind of machines will you be running this on? my computer can do in 0.5 seconds what one of the andrew machines can do in 5. does this mean that instead of a 5 second limit, we actually have a completely arbitrary time limit and we just have to guess what will happen to be 5 seconds on whatever computer you are running on?
obviously, then, it's stupid to NOT have a second thread running acting as a timer to get whatever the current best move is after 5 seconds. so then the question is, how reliable is your 5 second timer, and will it be exactly 5 seconds? if it is, then we really only have like 4.8 or 4.9 seconds, because if we accidently stop our thing at say, 5.01 seconds, then it gets terminated.
so, should we go for maybe, 4.75 seconds and count on your program stopping at 5 seconds and no sooner? or will you be giving us a little padding and killing the process at a little over 5 seconds?
thanks,
jason
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