Contempt 20

Set the default contempt value of Stockfish to 20 centipawns.

The contempt feature of Stockfish tries to prevent the engine from
simplifying the position too quickly when it feels that it is very
slightly behind, instead keeping the tension a little bit longer.

Various tests in November 2017 have proved that our current imple-
mentation works well against SF7 (which is about 130 Elo weaker than
current master) and than the Elo gain is an increasing function of
contempt, going (against SF7) from +0 Elo when contempt is set at
zero centipawns, to +30 Elo when contempt is 40 centipawns.

See pull request 1325 for details:

https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1325

This november discussion left open the decision of which "default"
value for contempt we should use for Stockfish, taking into account
the various uses ofStockfish (opening preparation for humans, computer
online tournaments,analysis tool for web pages, human/computer play,
etc).

This pull request proposes to set the default contempt value of SF
to twenty centipawns, which turns out to be the highest value which
is not a regression against current master, as this seemed to be a
good compromise between risk and safety. A couple of SPRT[-3..1]
tests were done to bisect this value:

Contempt 10: http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a5d42d20ebc5902977e2901 (PASSED)
Contempt 15: http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a5d41740ebc5902977e28fa (PASSED)
Contempt 20: http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a5d42060ebc5902977e28fc (PASSED)
Contempt 25: http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a5d433f0ebc5902977e2904 (FAILED)

Surprisingly, a test at "very long time control" hinted that using
contempt 20 is not only be non-regressive against contempt 0, but
may actually exhibit some small Elo gain, giving a likehood of superio-
rity of 88.7% after 8500 games:

VLTC:
ELO: 2.28 +-3.7 (95%) LOS: 88.7%
Total: 8521 W: 1096 L: 1040 D: 6385
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a60b2820ebc590297b9b7e0

Finally, there was some concerns that a contempt value of 20 would
be worse than a value of 7, but a test with 20000 games at STC was
neutral:

STC:
ELO: 0.45 +-3.1 (95%) LOS: 61.2%
Total: 20000 W: 4222 L: 4196 D: 11582
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a64d2fd0ebc590297903868

See the comments in pull request 1361 for the long, nice discussion
(180 entries :-)) leading to the decision to propose contempt 20 as
the default value:

https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1361

Whether Stockfish should strictly adhere to the Komodo and Houdini
semantics and add the UCI commands to force the contempt to be White
in the so-called "analysis mode" is still under discussion, and may
be or may not be the object of a future commit.

Bench: 5783344

diff --git a/src/ucioption.cpp b/src/ucioption.cpp
index b5d87c3b91a551f650efcfa48ed889cd0a07c44b..87ebaa833a56934aad128a155258b020fbdc45c8 100644 (file)
--- a/src/ucioption.cpp
+++ b/src/ucioption.cpp
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ void init(OptionsMap& o) {
   const int MaxHashMB = Is64Bit ? 131072 : 2048;
 
   o["Debug Log File"]        << Option("", on_logger);
-  o["Contempt"]              << Option(0, -100, 100);
+  o["Contempt"]              << Option(20, -100, 100);
   o["Threads"]               << Option(1, 1, 512, on_threads);
   o["Hash"]                  << Option(16, 1, MaxHashMB, on_hash_size);
   o["Clear Hash"]            << Option(on_clear_hash);