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Rodent's score might well be an artifact caused by the fact that it likes fianchetto and finds/completes it more often than other engines. Other opening-related bits and pieces are penalty for developing queen before minor pieces (but it is quite low and unlikely to influence the result), some code ...

EvalBlur is pseudo-random factor added to eval. In general, I do not use it for personalities above 1500 Elo, with one funny exception: "Drunk" personality with EvalBlur of 500 and unrestricted search. NPS to Elo ratio for Rodent will never be exact, because eval tweaks also change Elo, often in a s...

In general, Rodent achieves weaker play by (1) slower nodes per second and (2) adding pseudo-random factor to evaluation function (based on hash keys for consistency, but modified from game to game to avoid repetitiveness). Relevant functions are EloToSpeed() and EloToBlur() in params.cpp.

https://github.com/nescitus/Rodent_III/ ... sonalities

see "club" and "league" folders

With king + minor versus king + minor you can safely claim a draw as long as neither king stands on the rim. The idea of tweaking 50 move rule is great BTW.

Issue has been solved - it was an embarassing mistake of initializing huge arrays for Texel tuning in each engine instance

As for official release, I will probably wait for the next Graham's tournament.

Success of this technique probably depends on whether lower iterations help in move ordering by setting history values etc. If they help, then iteration right after one that returned hash score can actually take longer than all the skipped iterations together.

If there's not much slowdown with a bigger hash, then I'd be grateful. Rodent will default to its max hash (as displayed in UCI options), but it will handle 21 threads all right.

I am developing Rodent on a laptop - a decent one as far as laptops go, but obviously limited in terms of number of cores and hash size. For that reason not all tests that I'd like to make are feasible, and sometimes I am moving in the dark. As of now, I need a confirmation that increasing hash size...

Perhaps it is a draw, perhaps a win, but it is white to move. Does any engine try immediate b5?