Originally posted by WanderingKing
Hi. I hope I can ask this question here, because I have no idea where else. I have just installed Arena and Stockfish on my computer and I'm a bit lost when it comes to actually using them. I have several problems, but the biggest one is that my system will shut down automatically when I let Stockfish think for too long. My CPU works at 100% when Stock instead of 64 while installing Stockfish or Arena. Could this be what causes the problem?
Nothing like a chess engine post to flush me out of my hidey hole. I thought I'd be able to stay away from this place for a while. 😞
Yeah, I agree with Diophantus, it sounds to me that your CPUs are overheating. It's easy to do if you're running all CPUs full bore. You need to find a better way to cool the CPUs (maybe not a very practical suggestion), or (easier) change the number of threads to 1. That way, you're only using 50% of your CPU capacity, but also giving up a bit of performance.
The number 64 that you mentioned I think means that your CPU is a 64-bit design, as opposed to the older 32-bit designs. These chess engines can be compiled for either 32-bit or 64-bit CPUs. If you have a 64-bit CPU, you can run either compile version, but you can't run a 64-bit compiled engine on a 32-bit CPU.
I'd recommend that you install the "Core Temp" utility. The link was given on page 2 of this thread
Thread 139450.
By the way, I can't help but give a plug to an unofficial version of Stockfish. (Stockfish 2.1.1 PA GTB Gran2c). A group of guys improved the hash table usage a bit (helps when analyzing), and they added Gaviota tablebase support. (If you want to use the tablebases, you'd have to download the Gaviota tablebases from the internet, about 6.5 GB in size, the link is http://olympuschess.com/egtb/gaviota/index.php -- Just download all of the tablebase files into one folder and configure the engine to look for the tablebases in that folder and to use the cp4 extensions. Note that the cp4 file extension means that these tablebase files use the number 4 compression method.) Stockfish is pretty smart in the endgame without tablebases, but I'd think adding tablebases can only help with endgame analysis.
I did a brief test of this unofficial version, and using the tablebases doesn't seem to hurt the engine's playing strength to any significant degree. You can get the link to the unofficial version near the top of this page on the Rybka forum: http://rybkaforum.net/cgi-bin/rybkaforum/topic_show.pl?tid=22245
Having said all that, I'm not sure Stockfish is the best engine to use for analysis. It isn't bad, though. (Some have reported the results "jump around" a bit too much for their tastes.) Other good choices are the latest versions of Critter and Houdini. (Let me know if you need the links.)
I hope I've helped a little bit.
P.S. Oh yeah, don't forget, if you actually want to play against Stockfish, version 2.1.1 allows you to set the skill level from 20 (full strength) down to 0 (roughly about 1200 elo, I'd guess).