Marco Costalba [Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:18:17 +0000 (15:18 +0100)]
L1/L2 friendly PhaseTable[]
In Movepicker c'tor we access during initialization one of
MainSearchPhaseIndex..QsearchWithoutChecksPhaseIndex globals.
Postpone definition of PhaseTable[] just after them so that
when PhaseTable[] will be accessed later in get_next_move()
it will be already present in L1/L2.
It works like an implicit prefetching of PhaseTable[].
Also shrink PhaseTable[] to fit an L1 cache line of 16 bytes
using uint8_t instead of int.
This apparentely innocuous patch gives an astonish speed
up of 1.6% under MSVC 2010 beta, pgo optimized !
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Sun, 9 Aug 2009 23:20:54 +0000 (01:20 +0200)]
Enable prefetch also for gcc
This fix a compile error under Linux with gcc when
there aren't the intel dev libraries.
Also simplify the previous patch moving TT definition
from search.cpp to tt.cpp so to avoid using passing a
pointer to TT to the current position.
Finally simplify do_move(), now we miss a prefetch in the
rare case of setting an en-passant square but code is
much cleaner and performance penalty is almost zero.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Sun, 9 Aug 2009 14:53:51 +0000 (15:53 +0100)]
Try to prefetch as soon as position key is ready
Move prefetching code inside do_move() so to allow a
very early prefetching and to put as many instructions
as possible between prefetching and following retrieve().
With this patch retrieve() times are cutted of another 25%
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Sun, 9 Aug 2009 03:19:32 +0000 (04:19 +0100)]
Use 32 bit key in TT
Shrink key to 32 bits instead of 64. To still avoid
collisions use the high 32 bits of position key as the
TT key and the low 32 bits to retrieve the correct
cluster index in the table.
With this patch size og TTentry shrinks to 96 bits instead
of 128 and the cluster of 4 TTEntry sums to 48 bytes instead
of 64.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Sat, 8 Aug 2009 16:04:01 +0000 (17:04 +0100)]
Let LMR at root be independent of MultiPV value
Current formula enable LMR when
i + MultiPV >= LMRPVMoves
It means that, for instance, if MultiPV == 1 then LMR
will be started to be considered at move i = LMRPVMoves - 1,
while if MultiPV == 3 then it will start before,
at move i = LMRPVMoves - 3.
With this patch the formula becomes
i >= MultiPV + LMRPVMoves - 2
So that LMR will always start after LMRPVMoves - 1 moves
from the last PV move.
No functional change when MultiPV == 1
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Currently minimum split depth is set automatically to 6
when number of CPUs is more than 4. I believe this is a bad
idea since for example my quad (4CPU with hyperthreading) is
detected as 8CPU computer. I've manually lowered down the number
of Threads, but so far I have played all games with Minimum
Split Depth set to 6!
Since 4CPU computers with hyperthreading are quite common and
8 CPU computers extremely rear (I expect we can get a direct
jump to 16 or 32 cores), this automatic adjusting is likely
to do more harm than good. Add a note in Readme.txt, so that
those rear 8CPU owners can manually tweak the "Minimum Split
Depth" parameter
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Tord Romstad [Thu, 6 Aug 2009 16:07:32 +0000 (18:07 +0200)]
Fixed a bug in PV extraction from the transposition table: The
previous used move_is_legal to verify that the move from the TT
was legal, and the old version of move_is_legal only works when
the side to move is not in check. Fixed this by adding a separate,
slower version of move_is_legal which works even when the side to
move is in check.
Tord Romstad [Thu, 6 Aug 2009 11:27:49 +0000 (13:27 +0200)]
Added a new function build_pv(), which extends a PV by walking
down the transposition table.
When the search was stopped before a fail high at the root was
resolved, Stockfish would often print a very short PV, sometimes
consisting of just a single move. This was not only a little
user-unfriendly, but also harmed the strength a little in
ponder-on games: Single-move PVs mean that there is no ponder
move to search.
It is perhaps worth considering to remove the pv[][] array
entirely, and always build the entire PV from the transposition
table. This would simplify the source code somewhat and probably
make the program infinitesimally faster, at the expense of
sometimes getting shorter PVs or PVs with rubbish moves near
the end.
Tord Romstad [Tue, 4 Aug 2009 09:31:25 +0000 (11:31 +0200)]
Initial work towards adjustable playing strength.
Added the UCI_LimitStrength and the UCI_Elo options, with an Elo
range of 2100-2900. When UCI_LimitStrength is enabled, the number
of threads is set to 1, and the search speed is slowed down according
to the chosen Elo level.
Todo:
1. Implement Elo levels below 2100 by blundering on purpose and/or
crippling the evaluation.
2. Automatically calibrate the maximum Elo by measuring the CPU speed
during program initialization, perhaps by doing some bitboard
computations and measuring the time taken.
No functional change when UCI_LimitStrength is false (the default).
Marco Costalba [Thu, 23 Jul 2009 06:13:06 +0000 (07:13 +0100)]
Delay costly SEE call during captures ordering in MovePicker
When ordering moves we push all captures with negative SEE values
to badCaptures[] array during the scoring phase.
This patch delays the costly SEE call up to when the move has been
picked up in pick_move_from_list(), this way we save some SEE calls
in case we get a cutoff.
It seems we have a speed gain of about 1-1.5 % in terms of nodes/sec
and profiling seems to confirm the small but real speed increase.
Idea from Pablo Vazquez on talkchess.com
http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29018&start=20
It would be a no functional change but actually it is not because
now sorting set is different and so std::sort(), that is not a
stable sort, does not guarantees the order of same scored moves to
remain the same as before.
After 952 games at 1+0 we are below error bar, almost equal just
6 games of difference (+2 ELO)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:56:21 +0000 (09:56 +0100)]
Add Tord's polynomial material balance
Use a polynomial weighted evaluation to calculate
material value.
This is far more flexible and elegant then applying
a series of single euristic rules as before.
Also correct a design issue in which we returned two
values, one for middle game and one for endgame, while
instead, because game phase is a function of board
material itself, only one value should be calculated and
used both for mid and end game.
Verified it is equivalent to the tuning branch results with
parameter values sampled after 40.000 games.
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +277 =482 -240 51.85% 518.0/999 +13 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:07:45 +0000 (17:07 +0100)]
Use increased LMR horizont also in PV search
Tord says that using a lower horizon at PV nodes
looks strange and inconsistent with the general
philosophy of our search (i.e. always being more
conservative at PV nodes). So set LMR at 3 also
on search_pv().
Test result after 601 games seems to confirm this.
Mod vs Orig +156 =318 -127 52.41% 315.0/601 +17 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:05:54 +0000 (07:05 +0100)]
Reintroduce null move dynamic reduction
Test extension of LMR horizon to 3 plies alone, without
touching null move search. To keep the patch minimal we still
don't change LMR horizon in PV search. This will be the object
of the next patch.
Result seems good after 998 games:
Mod vs Orig +252/=518/-228 51.20% 511.0/998 +8 ELO
So dynamic null move reduction seems a bit stronger then
fixed reduction even with LMR horizon set to 3.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:43:09 +0000 (08:43 +0100)]
Use increased LMR horizont only after a null move
Revert to LMR horizont of 2 plies. Only if parent move
is a null move increase to 3 so to avoid the bad combination
of null move reduction + LMR reduction. This is a more
aggressive patch then previous one, but it seems we are
going in the wromg direction.
After 531 games result is not good:
Mod vs Orig +123/=265/-143 48.12% 255.5/531 -13 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:35:29 +0000 (13:35 +0100)]
Combine increased LMR horizont and fixed null move reduction
Set null move reduction to R=4, but increase the LMR horizon
to 3 plies. The two tweaks are related and should compensate
the combined effect of null move + LMR reduction at shallow
depths.
Idea from Tord.
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +251 =522 -225 51.30% + 9 ELO
On Tord iMac Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz, one thread,
Mac OS X 10.6, at 1+0 time control we have:
Mod vs Orig 994-1006 -1.4 ELO
But Orig version is pgo compiled and Mod is not.
The PGO compiled version is about 8% faster, which
corresponds to about 7 Elo points. This means that
results are reasonably consistent.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:16:20 +0000 (19:16 +0200)]
Fix two compile errors in new endgame code
Code that compiles cleanly under MSVC triggers one
compile error (correct) under Intel C++ and two(!)
under gcc.
The first is the same complained by Intel, but the second
is an interesting corner case of C++ standard (there are many)
that is correctly spotted only by gcc.
Both MSVC and Intel pass this silently, probably to avoid
breaking people code.
Now we are fully C++ compliant ;-)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Removed an incorrect assert() statement in search.cpp, which asserted that
a static eval cached in the transposition table would always equal the static
eval of the current position. This is in general not true, because the cached
value could be from a previous search with different evaluation parameter
settings, or from a search from the opposite side (Stockfish's evaluation
function is assymmetric by default).
Marco Costalba [Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:31:32 +0000 (14:31 +0200)]
Simplify endgame functions handling
We really don't need to have global endgame functions. We can
allocate them on the heap at initialization time and store the
corresponding pointer directly in the functions maps. To avoid
leaks we just need to remember to deallocate them in map d'tor.
These functions are always created in couple, one for each color,
so remove a lot of redundant hard coded info and just use the minimum
required: the type and the corresponding named string.
This greatly simplifies the code and also it is less error prone,
now is much simpler to add a new endgame specialized function: just
add the corresponding enum in endgame.h and the obvious add_xx()
call in EndgameFunctions c'tor, and of course, the most important part,
the EvaluationFunction<xxx>::apply() specialization in endgame.cpp
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:44:33 +0000 (11:44 +0100)]
Remove "Last seconds noise" filtering UCI option
This feature makes sense during development, but
It doesn't seem to make sense for normal users.
Also fix a possible race where the GUI adjudicates
the game a fraction of second before the engine sets
looseOnTime flag so that it will bogusly waits until
it ran out of time at the beginning of the next new game.
The fix is to always reset looseOnTime at the beginning
of a new game.
Race condition spotted by Tord.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Sat, 11 Jul 2009 08:54:30 +0000 (09:54 +0100)]
Introduce see_sign() and use it to shortcut full see()
Mostly of times we are interested only in the sign of SEE,
namely if a capture is negative or not.
If the capturing piece is smaller then the captured one we
already know SEE cannot be negative and this information
is enough most of the times. And of course it is much
faster to detect then a full SEE.
Note that in case see_sign() is negative then the returned
value is exactly the see() value, this is very important,
especially for ordering capturing moves.
With this patch the calls to the costly see() are reduced
of almost 30%.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Fri, 10 Jul 2009 20:41:23 +0000 (21:41 +0100)]
Joona tweaks of Weights and limits
Verification test give unusless result
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +250 =503 -246 50.20% +1 ELO
So we are well below our radar level. Neverthless
there are 100.000 games on Joona QUAD that we could
take in account and that shows that this tweak perhaps
has something good in it, altough very little.
Verification tests shows should not be a regression, at
least not a big one even in the worst case, so apply the
change anyway and keep the finger crossed ;-)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Strip whitespace from beginning of string sent to set_option_value().
It turned out that the input sent to set_option_value() when it is called by
set_option() in uci.cpp always started with at least one whitespace. In most
cases, this is not a problem, because the majority of UCI options have numeric
values. It did, however, cause a problem for UCI options with non-numerical
values, like options of type CHECK and COMBO. In particular, changing the
value of an option of type CHECK didn't work, because the comparisons with
"true" and "false" would always return false. This means that the "Ponder"
and "UCI_Chess960" options haven't been working for a while.
Marco Costalba [Sat, 4 Jul 2009 08:07:45 +0000 (09:07 +0100)]
Disable POPCNT support per default
This is mainly intended to allow 64 bit compiles on any
system and avoid to crash when the binary, compiled on a
box where POPCNT is not supported, is run on a Core i7
system or similar CPU.
What could happen is that when compiled in a standard 64 bit
system, because the correct headers for the POPCNT intrinsic
are not found, the compiler creates dummy bit count functions
instead, these are never called at runtime on the machine where
Stockfish has been compiled. But if we run the same binary on a
Core i7 system, because POPCNT is detected at run time, the dummy
bitcount functions will be called giving false results that will
crash the application.
Note that would be possible to fallback on software bit count in
these cases, but this is even more subtle because POPCNT path is not
optimized so that we have an application working but at sub-optimal
speed, so better to crash, at least user is loudly warned that there
is something wrong.
If, instead, Stockfish is compiled on a Core i7 system with POPCNT
enabled, then if the PGO compile has been done properly, the same binary
will run at optimal speed _both_ on the Core i7 machine and on any other
64 bit standard machine. This is the ideal mode for binary distribution.
Finally this patch disables bsfq support under Windows, because it seems
inline assembly is not supported both by MSVC and by Intel Windows version.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Fri, 3 Jul 2009 12:18:59 +0000 (13:18 +0100)]
Do not compile POPCNT if NO_POPCNT is defined
Also rename DISABLE_POPCNT_SUPPORT in NO_POPCNT and simplify a bit
the macro logic.
Always define a __popcnt64()or _mm_popcnt_u64() template, if the proper
function with the same name is defined in the intrinsics header, then it
will be choosen as first otherwise we fall back on the dummy template
that is never called at runtime anyway because cpu_has_popcnt() returns
false.
This fixes the compile error reported by Jim.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Fri, 3 Jul 2009 10:28:11 +0000 (12:28 +0200)]
Microptimize pawns info access
Avoid indirect calling of piece_of_color_and_type(c, PAWN) and its
alias pawns(c) in the pawn evaluation loop, but use the pawns
bitboards accessed only once before entering the loop.
Also explicitly mark functions as static to better self-document.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Thu, 2 Jul 2009 14:49:41 +0000 (16:49 +0200)]
Retire USE_COMPACT_ROOK_ATTACKS and USE_FOLDED_BITSCAN defines
This greatly simplifies bitboard.cpp that now has only two setups,
respectively for 32 and 64 bits CPU according to IS_64BIT define
that is automatically set but can be tweaked manually in
bitboard.h
No functional change both in 32 and in 64 bits.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Sun, 28 Jun 2009 03:56:58 +0000 (05:56 +0200)]
Explicitly use delta psqt values when possible
Instead of add and subtract pqst values corrisponding to
the move starting and destination squares, do it in one
go with the helper function pst_delta<>()
This simplifies the code and also better documents that what
we need is a delta value, not an absolute one.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco Costalba [Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:31:39 +0000 (08:31 +0100)]
Micro optimize and rename move_promotion()
Rename to move_is_promotion() to be more clear, also add
a new function move_promotion_piece() to get the
promotion piece type in the few places where is needed.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Joona Kiiski [Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:16:51 +0000 (13:16 +0300)]
Disable use of aspiration window in known win positions
When we are hunting for mate, transposition table is filled in
with mate scores. Current implemenatation of aspiration search
can't cope with this very well.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Joona Kiiski [Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:07:16 +0000 (11:07 +0300)]
Bugfix: KRK was not classified as KNOWN_WIN
Problem is that npMaterial is compared to _endgame_ value
of rook, although npMaterial is always (also in endgame!)
calculated using _middlegame_ values.
Bug was hidden as long as Rook middlegame
and endgame values were same.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
projects / stockfish / log