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I had a strange occasional bug where stalemate detection and pruning could collide, and that lead to losses exactly like this one here. The basic flow was like this: * try very stupid move * find that it was so stupid that everything below it would be pruned away * at the end of the for-loop over th...

No problem. Can our 1.30 results bl combined with 1.31? Yes. The only difference is that the search eval is stable in the very rare endgame KQ:KP where that gives draw. No impact on playing strength, it just bothered me when I saw that. :-) I expect CT800 to finish in the top three. :) Unless Dorps...

Thanks, as always, for your efforts, Graham! I'm curious how CT800 will fare relative to it's father NG-Play. Btw., there is a version v1.31 of CT800, but that's not meant for CCRL because it has only a minor cosmetic bugfix without impact on playing strength. Just saying, not that you waste time wi...

https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/905 I guess download Ethereal at your own risk then. I really can't understand how people can be so proud on crashing engines and the associated security risk that they even mark it as "won't fix". As if basic string parsing cost Elo or were th...

I respectfully disagree. Send my program proper input as per the spec, or crash out. That's why we get infected computers - because too much software is coded with that mindset. And because attackers find ways to feed invalid input to programs in order to make use of missing validation. A crash is ...

Maybe something simple like .... no half move and full move, which WILL crash Ethereal. Software that takes input should never crash upon invalid input because these days, that amounts to a potential security issue. Using default values can be fine, and in this case, it is reasonable to assume no c...

the idea to penalize King and Queen moves a little bit more than other moves in the middle game isn't even mine That's not the point. The question is why the engine is tempted to move the queen around. I think it's because the queen doesn't have many squares available from d1/d8, and if mobility is...

Rebel wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 18, 2018 4:41 pm

If a whatever engine change produces elo then that is a good change for that particular engine.

Nobody denied that hiding a bug can give better play. The argument on the table is that fixing it would be even better.

Rebel wrote: ↑

Thu Aug 16, 2018 6:43 am

#1. Decreasing every eval ingrediënt with 5% should give the same improvement, I somehow doubt that.

Aside from integer arithmetics issues, I really don't doubt that (a + b) * c == a*c + b*c.

Rebel wrote: ↑

Wed Aug 15, 2018 4:24 pm

score -= (score-material) * 0.05

If that works out, it just means that the positional scoring is overdone by 5%. It has nothing to do with tempo.