-test_cycles is for testing Rosetta. It will run only a small number of cycles – these are not exact numbers, but it will run say 10 Monte Carlo cycles instead of 10,000. You cannot and should not use test_cycles for anything other than testing that Rosetta is compiled and working – certainly never for modeling.
It’s the equivalent of baking a cake for 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes – you can see that the oven gets hot, but you aren’t going to make a cake.
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