noobpwnftw [Sat, 22 Dec 2018 17:05:13 +0000 (01:05 +0800)]
Fix crash in best_group() (#1891)
This pull request fixes a rare crashing bug on Windows inside our NUMA code, first
reported by Dann Corbit in the following forum thread (thanks!):
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/fishcooking/gA6aoMEuOwg
The fix is to not use structure member beyond known size when iterating through
'SYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION_EX' structure. We note that the Microsoft
API is guaranteed to provide us at least one element upon successful, and no
element in the structure can have a zero size.
The `&& (ss-1)->killers[0] ` conditions are there seemingly to protect
accessing ss-5.
This is unneeded and not so intuitive (as the killer is checked for equality
with currentMove, and that one is non-zero once we're high enough in the stack,
this protects access to ss-5). We can just extend the stack from ss-4 to ss-5,
so we can call update_continuation_histories(ss-1, ..) always in search.
This goes a bit further than #1881 and addresses a comment in #1878.
protonspring [Mon, 17 Dec 2018 17:25:25 +0000 (10:25 -0700)]
Improve endgame KBN vs K (#1877)
Even when playing without endgame table bases, this particular endgame should
be a win 100% of the time when Stockfish is given a KRBK position, assuming
there are enough moves remaining in the FEN to finish the game without hitting
the 50 move rule.
PROBLEM: The issue with master here is that the PushClose difference per square
is 20, however, the difference in squares for the PushToCorners array is usually
less. Thus, the engine prefers to move the kings closer together rather than pushing
the weak king to the correct corner.
What happens is if the weak king is in a safe corner, SF still prefers pushing the
kings together. Occasionally, the strong king traps the weak king in the safe corner.
It takes a while for SF to figure it out, but often draws the game by the 50 move rule
(on shorter time controls).
This patch increases the PushToCorners values to correct this problem. We also added
an assert to catch any overflow problem if anybody would want to increase the array
values again in the future.
It was tested in a couple of matches starting with random KRBK positions and showed
increased winning rates, see https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1877
Ubuntu 16.04 can now be used with travis. Updating all the other stuff
when there.
Invoking the lld linker seems to save 5 minutes with clang on linux.
mstembera [Sun, 23 Dec 2018 15:10:07 +0000 (07:10 -0800)]
Use a bit less code to calculate hashfull() (#1830)
* Use a bit less code to calculate hashfull(). Change post increment to preincrement as is more standard
in the rest of stockfish. Scale result so we report 100% instead of 99.9% when completely full.
protonspring [Sat, 8 Dec 2018 17:08:59 +0000 (10:08 -0700)]
Simplify KBNK endgame implementation
We do not need to change the winnerKSq variable, so we can simplify
a little bit the logic of the code by changing only the loserKSq
variable when it is necessary. Also consolidate and clarify comments.
See the pull request thread for a proof that the code is correct:
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1854
mstembera [Tue, 18 Dec 2018 07:50:57 +0000 (08:50 +0100)]
New voting formula for threads
We now use a quadratic formula during the vote for threads
when deciding on which thread to pick a move from.
time control 5+0.05, with 8 threads:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 20202 W: 4031 L: 3813 D: 12358
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5c16c8e60ebc5902ba1223e2
time control 20+0.2, with 8 threads:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 14330 W: 2290 L: 2115 D: 9925
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5c16efca0ebc5902ba122993
20000 games match at time control 5+0.05, with 31 threads:
ELO: 5.63 +-2.8 (95%) LOS: 100.0%
Total: 20000 W: 3539 L: 3215 D: 13246
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5c16f07a0ebc5902ba122a20
31m059 [Sat, 15 Dec 2018 06:55:25 +0000 (01:55 -0500)]
Use stronglyProtected
~stronglyProtected is quite similar to ~attackedBy[Them][PAWN] & ~attackedBy2[Them],
the only difference appears to be that the former includes squares attacked twice
by both sides. The resulting logic is simpler, and the change appears to be at least
Elo-neutral at both STC and LTC.
Inspired by Nick Pelling's test
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5c144d110ebc5902ba11e4af
and an older test of mine
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5c0402810ebc5902bcee1fc8
is almost never true, since at the root alpha for depth < 5 is -VALUE_INFINITE.
Nevertheless with the new failHigh scheme, this is not guaranteed, and rootDepth > 5,
can still result in a depth < 2 search at the rootNode. If now another thread,
via the hash, writes a new low eval to the rootPos qsearch can be entered.
Rare but not unseen... I assume that some of the crashes in fishtest recently
might be due to this.
As noticed in the forum, a crash in extract_ponder_from_tt could result
if hash size is set before the ponder move is printed. While it is arguably
a GUI issue (but it got me on the cli), it is easy to avoid this issue.
31m059 [Thu, 13 Dec 2018 05:35:00 +0000 (00:35 -0500)]
Remove Null Move Pruning material threshold
On November 30th, @xoto10 experimented with removing this threshold,
but the simplification barely failed LTC. I was inspired to try various
[0, 4] tweaks to increase its value, which would narrow the effects of
this threshold without removing it entirely. Various values repeatedly
led to Elo gains at both STC and LTC, most of which were insufficient
to pass.
After a couple of weeks, I tried again to find an Elo-gaining tweak
but noticed that I could raise the threshold higher and higher without
regression. I decided to try removing it entirely--forgetting that
@xoto10 had already attempted this. However, this now performs much
better at both STC and LTC, producing a STC Elo gain and also potentially
a smaller LTC one.
The reason appears to be a recent change in master (e8ffca3) near
this code, which interacts with this patch. This simplification
governs the conditions under which that patch's effects are applied.
Something non-obvious about that change has significantly improved
the performance of this simplification.
I recognize and thank @xoto10, who originally had this idea. Since
I ran several LTCs recently (to determine whether to open this PR,
or one for a related [0, 4]), I would also like to acknowledge the
other developers and CPU donors for their patience. Thank you all!
SFisGOD [Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:34:17 +0000 (03:34 +0800)]
A combo of parameter tweaks
Joint work by SFisGOD, xoroshiro and Chess13234.
This combo consists of the following tweaks:
Assorted bonuses and penalties by SFisGOD
Bishop and Rook PSQT by SFisGOD
Tempo Value by xoroshiro
Futility pruning by Chess13234
Some obvious followups to this are to further tune this PSQT, or
try 8x8 for other pieces. As of now I don't plan on trying this
for other pieces as I think the majority of the ELO it brings is
for pawns and kings.
Looking at the new values, the differences between kingside and
queenside are quite significant. I am very hopeful that this a
llows SF to understand and plan pawn structures even better than
it already does. Cheers!
protonspring [Tue, 11 Dec 2018 12:47:56 +0000 (05:47 -0700)]
Changes identified in RENAME/REFORMATTING thread (#1861)
I've gone through the RENAME/REFORMATTING thread and changed everything I could find, plus a few more. With this, let's close the previous issue and open another.
xoto10 [Sun, 2 Dec 2018 15:29:31 +0000 (15:29 +0000)]
Simplify time manager in search()
Remove the F[] array which I find unhelpful and rename `improvingFactor` to
`fallingEval` since larger values indicate a falling eval and more time use.
I realise a test was not strictly necessary, but I ran STC [-3,1] just to
check there are no foolish errors before creating the pull request:
It was then suggested to clean the constants around `fallingEval`
to make it more clear this is a factor around ~1 that adjusts time
up or downwards depending on some conditions. We then ran a double
test with this simplification suggestion:
Vizvezdenec [Sun, 2 Dec 2018 19:18:14 +0000 (20:18 +0100)]
Introduce concept of double pawn protection.
Exclude doubly protected by pawns squares when calculating attackers on
king ring. Idea of this patch is not to count attackers if they attack
only squares that are protected by two pawns.
Miguel Lahoz [Fri, 30 Nov 2018 05:35:47 +0000 (13:35 +0800)]
Penalize refuted killers in continuation history
Currently we apply a penalty in continuation history for refuted TT moves.
We can use the same idea to also penalize refuted killer moves in continuation
history.
This is also the 10th anniversary version of the Stockfish project, which
started exactly ten years ago! I wish to extend a huge thank you to
all contributors and authors in our amazing community :-)
The patch was tested for correctness by running bench with and
without the change against current master, and the tablebase hit
numbers were found to be identical in both cases. See the pull
request comments for details:
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1826
31m059 [Sat, 24 Nov 2018 06:55:09 +0000 (01:55 -0500)]
Simplify casting extension
On November 16th, before the removal of the depth condition, I tried
revising castling extensions to only handle castling moves, rather than
moves that change castling rights generally. It appeared to be a slight
Elo gain at STC but insufficient to pass [0, 4] (+0.5 Elo), but what I
overlooked was that it made pos.can_castle(us) irrelevant and should
have been a simplification. Recent discussion with @Chess13234 and
Michael Chaly (@Vizvezdenec) inspired me to take a second look, and
the simplification continues to pass when rebased on the current master.
This replaces two conditions with one, because type_of(move) == CASTLING
implies pos.can_castle(Us), allowing us to remove the latter condition.
Turn on MADV_RANDOM for Syzygy mmaps (on Unix-like builds)
When running on a cloud VM (n1-highcpu-96) with several NVMe SSDs and
some non-SSDs for tablebases, I noticed that the average SSD request size was
more than 256 kB. This doesn't make a lot of sense for Syzygy tablebases,
which have a block size of 32 bytes and very low locality.
Seemingly, the tablebase access patterns during probing make the OS,
at least Linux, think that readahead is advantageous; normally, it
gives up doing readahead if there are too many misses, but it doesn't,
perhaps due to the fairly high overall hit rates. (It seems the kernel cannot
distinguish between reading a block that was paged in because the userspace
wanted it explicitly, and one that was read as part of readahead.)
Setting MADV_RANDOM effectively turns off readahead, which causes
the request size to drop to 4 kB. In the aforemented cloud VM test,
this roughly tripled the amount of I/O requests that were able to go
through, while reducing the total traffic from 2.8 GB/sec to 56 MB/sec
(moving the bottleneck to the non-SSDs; it seems the SSDs could have
sustained many more requests).
Jörg Oster [Sun, 25 Nov 2018 10:27:40 +0000 (11:27 +0100)]
Qsearch simplification. (#1828)
Don't do an extra TT update in case of a fail-high,
but simply break off the moves loop and let the TT update
at the end of qsearch do this job.
Same workflow/logic as in our main search function now.
Tested for no regression to be on the safe side.
STC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 30237 W: 6665 L: 6560 D: 17012
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bf928e80ebc5902bced3f3a
I've recently tried to introduce tropism difference term in kingdanger which
passed STC 6 times but failed LTC all the time. Maybe using quadratic scaling
for it will also be helpful.
31m059 [Sat, 24 Nov 2018 01:09:03 +0000 (02:09 +0100)]
Remove the tropism term from kingDanger
A recent LTC tuning session by @candirufish showed this term decreasing significantly. It appears that it can be removed altogether without significant Elo loss.
I also thank @GuardianRM, whose attempt to remove tropism from king danger inspired this one.
After this PR is merged, my next step will be to attempt to tune the coefficients of this new, simplified kingDanger calculation.
Because of aggressive time management and optimistic assumptions
about move overhead, it's still very easy to get Stockfish to forfeit
on time when we hit an endgame and have Syzygy EGTB on a spinning
drive. The latency from serving a few thousand EGTB probes (~10ms each),
of which there can currently be up to 4000 outstanding before a time
check, will easily overwhelm the default Move Overhead of 30ms.
This problem was first raised by Gian-Carlo Pascutto and some solutions
and improvements were discussed in the following pull requests:
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1471
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1623
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1783
This patch is a minimal change proposed by Marco Costalba to lower
the impact of the bug. We now force a check of the clock right after
each tablebase read.
(1) The bonus value has not been carefully tested, so it may be possible
to find slightly better values.
(2) Plan is to now try adding similar restriction for pawns. I wanted to
include that as part of this pull request, but I was advised to do it as
two separate pull requests. STC is currently running here, but may not add
enough value to pass green.
Preparation commit for the upcoming Stockfish 10 version, giving a chance to catch last minute feature bugs and evaluation regression during the one-week code freeze period. Also changing the copyright dates to include 2019.
Personally, I feel like SF has been tuned to death recently and that we
need to step away from existing-parameter tunes for a bit and focus more
on new ideas. I don't really think there's much more ELO in these tunes
(for now). For me at least, this was the last existing-parameter tune I'll
be running for quite a while. Cheers!
protonspring [Fri, 2 Nov 2018 16:49:51 +0000 (10:49 -0600)]
Code style in search.cpp
It does not appear to be not necessary or advantageous to
conditionally initialize kingRing[Us] or kingAttackersCount[Them],
so the 'else' can be removed.
The values in the rook table now look a bit strange for a human eye
and are hard to explain, maybe it would be nice to simplify them
by hand and see if we can pass another (clean) double green with a
more regular array.
Vizvezdenec [Fri, 9 Nov 2018 01:02:24 +0000 (04:02 +0300)]
Change default contempt from 21 to 24 centipawns
To top the rating lists and get more interesting middle play, it
is a good habit to set the default contempt to the highest value
that does not regress against contempt=0. We recently decreased
PawnValueEg it is logical that to raise a little bit the default
higher contempt because of the following internal dependency in
line 334 of search.cpp :
````
int ct = int(Options["Contempt"]) * PawnValueEg / 100; // From centipawns
````
STC: contempt=24 passed non-regression vs contempt=0
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd6d7f80ebc595e0ae21e14
LTC: contempt=24 passed non-regression LTC vs contempt=0
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd6e0980ebc595e0ae21f07
On 2018-11-01, we also tested the effects of contempt=21 and contempt=24
against Stockfish 9, and the net result was neutral:
Nooby [Sat, 27 Oct 2018 20:12:34 +0000 (04:12 +0800)]
Clear TableBase mappings in Search::clear()
This patch will make possible to free mapped TB files with "ucinewgame" command.
We wrote this patch specifically to address a problem that arose while
running Stockfish with 7-piece tablebases as a kibitzer at TCEC for
extended periods of time across multiple games. It was noted that after
some time, the NPS of the kibitzing Stockfish (which is usually 3x faster
than the Stockfish actually competing) would drop precipitously, eventually
falling to preposterously low numbers until restarted.
Their eval bot basically inputs FEN, go infinite, stop and loop, it probably
didn't do ucinewgame either. As time goes it gradually slowed down and OS
starts to use swap, this is not reasonable since the engine only uses 16GB
hash and the machine has 1TB physical RAM and does nothing else.
mstembera [Sun, 11 Nov 2018 03:49:13 +0000 (19:49 -0800)]
Remove redundant king square parameter
We don't need to pass the king square as an explicit parameter to the functions
king_safety() and do_king_safety() since we already pass in the position.
31m059 [Sun, 11 Nov 2018 21:14:28 +0000 (16:14 -0500)]
Simplify tropism. (#1807)
We calculate tropism as a sum of two factors. The first is the number of squares in our kingFlank and Camp that are attacked by the enemy; the second is number of these squares that are attacked twice. Prior to this commit, we excluded squares we defended with pawns from this second value, but this appears unnecessary. (Doubly-attacked squares near our king are still dangerous.) The removal of this exclusion is a possible small Elo gain at STC (estimated +1.59) and almost exactly neutral at LTC (estimated +0.04).
Some small changes in evaluation to try to convince Stockfish to centralize
her rooks more in middle game and avoid trapping them in the corners. Joint
work by SFisGOD and snicolet.
The recently committed Fail-High patch (081af9080542a0d076a5482da37103a96ee15f64)
had a number of changes beyond adjusting the depth of search on fail high, with
some undesirable side effects.
1) Decreasing depth on PV output, confusing GUIs and players alike as described in
issue #1787. The depth printed is anyway a convention, let's consider adjustedDepth
an implementation detail, and continue to print rootDepth. Depth, nodes, time and
move quality all increase as we compute more. (fixing this output has no effect on
play).
2) Fixes go depth output (now based on rootDepth again, no effect on play), also
reported in issue #1787
3) The depth lastBestDepth is used to compute how long a move is stable, a new move
found during fail-high is incorrectly considered stable if based on adjustedDepth
instead of rootDepth (this changes time management). Reverting this passed STC
and LTC:
4) In the thread voting scheme, the rank of the fail-high thread is now artificially
low, incorrectly since the quality of the move is much better than what adjustedDepth
suggests (e.g. if it takes 10 iterations to find VALUE_KNOWN_WIN, it has very low
depth). Further evidence comes from a test that showed that the move of highest
depth is not better than that of the last PV (which is potentially of much lower
adjustedDepth).
I.e. this test http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd37a120ebc595e0ae1e7c3
failed SPRT[0, 5]:
In a running 5+0.05 th 8 test (more than 10000 games) a positive Elo estimate is
shown (strong enough for a [-3,1], possibly not [0,4]):
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd421be0ebc595e0ae1f315
LLR: -0.13 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,4.00]
Total: 13644 W: 2573 L: 2532 D: 8539
Elo 1.04 [-2.52,4.61] / LOS 71%
Thus, restore old behavior as a bugfix, keeping the core of the fail-high patch
idea as resolving scheme. This is non-functional for bench, but changes searches
via time management and in the threaded case.
ThreatByKing (tuned values)
Green STC (50.8k games)
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd1d5a00ebc595e0ae1cbec
LTC (I stopped this test at 71.2k games. It's likely yellow.)
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd263e70ebc595e0ae1d77e
WeakUnopposedPawn (tweak) by xoto (https://github.com/xoto10)
Green STC (102.8k games)
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd306bb0ebc595e0ae1e146
Yellow LTC (90.8k games)
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd3ea660ebc595e0ae1f16b
aspiTune1 (tweak) by vondele (https://github.com/vondele)
Green STC (125.9k games)
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd2ae100ebc595e0ae1dab0
Yellow LTC (107.9k games)
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bd3eb700ebc595e0ae1f16f
Thank you @31m059 (Mark Tenzer) for helping me! Also, thank you very much
for recognizing my efforts. I genuinely appreciate it.
No-Regression test with 8 threads, tc=15+0.15:
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5bc874ca0ebc592439f85938
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 24740 W: 3977 L: 3863 D: 16900 Elo +1.60
This was a cooperation between me and Michael Stembera:
-me recognizing SF having problems with resolving FH's efficiently at
high depths, thus starting some tests based on consecutive FH's.
-mstembera picking up the idea with first success at STC & LTC (so full
credits to him!)
-me suggesting how to resolve the issues pinpointed by S.G on PR #1768
and finally restricting the logic to the main thread so that it don't
regresses at multi-thread.
Enable numa machinery only for STRICTLY MORE than 8 threads. Reason for this
change is that nowadays SMP tests are always done with 8 threads. That is a
problem for multi-socket Windows machines running on fishtest.
The patch adds a small random component (+-1) to VALUE_DRAW for the evaluation
of draw positions (mostly 3folds). This random component is not static, but
potentially different for each visit of the node (hence derived from the node
counter). The effect is that in positions with many 3fold draw lines, different
lines are followed at each iteration. This keeps the search much more dynamic,
as opposed to being locked to one particular 3fold.
An example of a position where master suffers from 3fold-blindness and this patch
solves quickly is the famous TCEC game 53:
FEN: 3r2k1/pr6/1p3q1p/5R2/3P3p/8/5RP1/3Q2K1 b - - 0 51
master doesn't see that this is a lost position (draw eval up to depth 50) as
Qf6-e6 d4-d5 (found by patch at depth 23) leads to a loss.
The 3fold-blindness is more important at longer TC, the patch was yellow STC and
LTC, but passed VLTC:
Currently we update (track up) the pv even in the fail high case.
However most times in such cases the pv in the ply below remains unset
because there we have value == alpha and so finally we see truncated
pv's (=just one move) in fail high cases.
Of course tracking down these pv's (+sending them to the gui) comes at a
certian cost, but no-regression tests passed:
N.B.: Digging also into qsearch was tried in another version but seemed
not to pass the tests. This means that we don't always will get a pv
until the very tips.
Miguel Lahoz [Thu, 20 Sep 2018 07:12:12 +0000 (15:12 +0800)]
Simplify evaluation of blockers_for_king
Currently, we have two evaluation terms which account for pinned pieces.
One is for all pinned pieces in kingDanger computation and another for
just pinned pawns in ThreatByRank. We can increase the relevant bonus
for kingDanger calculation and do away with the ThreatByRank, which
seems to just add more complexity.
ttCapture can be assigned to only once outside of the main loop. The patch seems
functional at higher depths (seems possible in the case of non-legal TTmoves that
are captures).
31m059 [Mon, 8 Oct 2018 18:43:45 +0000 (14:43 -0400)]
Combo
This PR is a combination of two unrelated [0, 4] patches that appeared promising
but not quite strong enough to pass on their own. The combination initially failed
STC with a positive score after a long run, and the subsequent speculative LTC test
passed.
* tweak_threatOnQueen4 :
Increase the middlegame components of ThreatByMinor[QUEEN]
and ThreatByRook[QUEEN] by 15 each. Bryan's (@crossbr) analysis of CCC Bonus Game 10
inspired several tests on penalizing a queen with limited safe mobility. While
attempting to implement this idea, I noticed that when I did not include the queen's
current square in the calculations, the Elo gains seemed to vanish--and only then did
I have the idea to revisit ThreatByMinor[QUEEN] and ThreatByRook[QUEEN], adding a
corresponding value to each. Without Bryan's work, this test would never have been
submitted. I would also like to recognize the efforts and contributions of @SFisGOD,
who also vigorously worked on this idea.
* Use pure static eval for null move pruning :
This idea was directly re-purposed from a promising test by Jerry Donald Watson
(@jerrydonaldwatson) in August. It was also independently developed and tested by
Stefan Geschwentner (@locutus2) previously.
Thank you all!
Note by snicolet: I use this non-functional change patch
as a pretext to correct the wrong bench number I introduced
in the message of the previous commit.
These two simplifications appear to be affecting and/or offsetting each other.
Neither can be removed independently, but in combination they pass -3,1.
Storing unconditionally the current generation and bound is equivalent to master.
Part of the condition was added as a speed optimization in #429.
Here the branch is fully eliminated.
The multithreaded test was run after a plausible suggestion by @mstembera that the effect of this could be larger with many cores. The result seems to indicate this doesn't really matter on the 8core architecture abundantly available on fishtest.
This patch is a combinaison of two parameters tweaks patches which
have failed as strong yellows at LTC recently, by Alain Savard (Rocky640)
and Fabian Fichter (ianfab):
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5b8a71e60ebc592cf2749b1d
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5b81ce3b0ebc5902bdbb6585
The null move reduction formula in line 769 of search.cpp is quite convoluted
and full of mysterious magic constants at the moment, it would certainly be
nice to simplify it and/or gain more Elo from it:
Rocky640 [Fri, 31 Aug 2018 13:30:16 +0000 (09:30 -0400)]
Long Diagonal Tweaks
a) Reduce PSQT values along the long diagonals on non-central squares
and increase the LongDiagonal bonus accordingly. The effect is to penalise
bishops on the long diagonal which can not "see" the 2 central squares.
The "good" bishops still have more or less the same bonus as current master.
b) For a bishop on a central square, because of the "| s" term in the code,
the LongDiagonalBonus was always given. So while being there, remove the "| s"
and compensate the central Bishop PSQT accordingly.
protonspring [Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:48:45 +0000 (02:48 +0200)]
Remove PawnsOnBothFlanks
It looks like PawnsOnBothFlanks can be removed from initiative().
A barrage of tests seem to confirm that the adjustment to -110
does not gain elo to offset any potential loss by removing
PawnsOnBothFlanks.
The fact that endgames with all the pawns on only one flank are
drawish is a well-known chess idea, so it seems quite strange that
this can be removed so easily without losing Elo.
In the past there had been attempts to improve on PawnsOnBothFlanks
with similar concepts (for instance using the pawn span value), but
the tests were at best neutral. Maybe Stockfish is now mature enough
that these refined ideas would work to replace PawnsOnBothFlanks?
MJZ1977 [Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:27:47 +0000 (02:27 +0200)]
Fix bug with "excludedMove" for probcut
Bugfix: "excludedMove" has to be skipped in the probcut loop too.
If it is not skipped, the probcut can exit quickly with a wrong return
value corresponding to the excluded move. See the following forum
thread for a discussion:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/fishcooking/GGithf_VwSU
projects / stockfish / log