TalkChess.com

Thanks for the clarification! It was hard to fathom that SlowChess could be so strong with only 320 inputs and two 32 node layers. I guess that your NN topology with 705 inputs and 320 nodes in the first hidden layer is sufficient to roughly equal the best HCE. That's really cool! I know very little...

Hi Jon, SlowChess is my favorite engine and this is the most interesting post I've seen recently. I'm surprised that there have been no replies. What are the 320 inputs that you use? I would think that 6x64 = 384 inputs (or maybe 352 if only 32 squares are used for king location) would be a minimum....

How do you think this automated tuning affected Wasp's offensive middlegame style ? :) I think it's about the same or maybe a little more aggressive than the previous version. I guess we'll find out from Frank's upcoming tournament. I should probably start keeping some statistics from my gauntlet t...

Tuning is now done in a similar fashion to back-propogation for neural networks rather than the gradient-descent method... ...each pertinent term is tweaked by a small amount in the direction to reduce error. this is the gradient-descent. the neural network also uses gradient-descent. backprop prop...

Wasp 4.5 is released today. I estimate it to be about 50 Elo stronger than Wasp 4.0. Many thanks John. How do you use the config file. I used example_config with UCI_Elo = 1200 and set ConfigFilePath=./example_config in the Shredder 12 GUI. But it seems to search much more deeply than I expect for ...

Wasp 4.5 is released today. I estimate it to be about 50 Elo stronger than Wasp 4.0. Many thanks to Frank Quisinsky for hosting Wasp on his website. Here is the link: https://www.amateurschach.de/download/wasp_450.zip Thank you, John! Nice news. What is the "proper" version number: 4.5 or 4.50 ? We...

Tuning is now done in a similar fashion to back-propogation for neural networks rather than the gradient-descent method... ...each pertinent term is tweaked by a small amount in the direction to reduce error. this is the gradient-descent. the neural network also uses gradient-descent. backprop prop...

Wasp 4.5 is released today. I estimate it to be about 50 Elo stronger than Wasp 4.0. Many thanks to Frank Quisinsky for hosting Wasp on his website. Here is the link: https://www.amateurschach.de/download/wasp_450.zip Most of the strength increase comes from re-writing the evaluation function to all...

For the past few weeks I've been playing games between Wasp and SlowChess and SC is about 160 Elo better than the current Wasp in my testing. It's my favorite program to test against using Arena where I watch many of the games. It is extremely strong in the endgame, and very good at everything else....

Hi Frank!

I haven't implemented any UCI settings to vary the new eval terms yet, but I will probably add the ability to vary material values, pawn structure, passed pawns, and maybe piece activity.

John