How strong is the new Fire 1.5 xTreme?

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Why not posting the parameters? The number of testers will increase and the results will be more reliable...

It's not that I don't want to release them....Eventually I will when I have solid results related to the performance....

Besides,from a personal experience,when you post a special set of parameters in a rush,most of the testers don't take them too serious....
Dr.D

It will be hard to collect enough LTC games if it's only you doing the testing but of course it's your right because you came up with the settings.
Some testers will get discouraged by preliminary settings released "in a rush" but no tester will be able to help if you choose a late release.
God luck and keep us posted, I think Fire is getting stronger from the game analysis perspective which is very subjective of course.

I will release the parameters Gino and when I do so I promise that you'll be more than satisfied
Cheers,
Dr.D

[Gino Figlio]

Thank you Wael, don't worry if the final results are not encouraging. From my perspective, game analysis is more important than game results.

[David Dahlem]

As you noticed,I've changed all the pieces values using a well tested formula plus changing the king's safety parameter,the mobility and the positional weights....
Dr.D

I don't suppose you're willing to share your piece value formula? I'm extremely interested in piece value tuning, and have tested every piece value set i could find.

I noticed your king's safety parameter, mobility weight positional weight are almost identical to parameters i already have, from a post on another forum. That poster must have been you,right?

Regards Dave

[kranium]

just a quick note....

i'm releasing Fire 2.0 xTreme as we speak...
i certainly recommend that users now use this latest version.
any fire.cfg file or saved UCI option form a previous version should be 100% compatible with 2.0

there likely no big ELO increase, but several issues have been resolved.
largest of which was the occasional Playchess.com crashing.

major changes:
now supports up to 64 cores/threads
occasional crash fixed
code improvements, bitwise optimizations
SEE piece/capture values are no longer constant entities
fire.cfg incorrect default value for Prune_Pawn fixed: Prune_pawn = 160
Fire now recognizes whether or not the system supports hardware popcount
and/or large pages, and self-configures itself accordingly
some code cleanup, formatting, and re-organization
more complete Log implementation
UCI clear hash button added
etc.

at the moment this is about as good as I can get it...

i have had a tremendous response and I want to thank all concerned...
many have emailed me with settings/parameters that they claim now equal Houdini,
especially when using a large powerful system.
that is of course very gratifying, as it was my goal during the creation of these xTreme configuration
releases.

for the future, i do hope the configurations are shared...
and eventually brought over to any new version of IvanHoe that may be created.

Best Regards-
Norm

[MrEdCollins]

Question:

If the Prune_pawn value in the cfg file should be 160, should we just change that value in the configuration ourselves? Or is there a new fire.cfg file to download?


I found version 2.01 here

http://www.chesslogik.com/index.htm

but there doesn't seem to be a new fire.cfg file, unless I missed it.

[kranium]

Question:

If the Prune_pawn value in the cfg file should be 160, should we just change that value in the configuration ourselves? Or is there a new fire.cfg file to download?


I found version 2.01 here

http://www.chesslogik.com/index.htm

but there doesn't seem to be a new fire.cfg file, unless I missed it.

Hi Ed-

using a fire.cfg configuration file is completely optional...
it is very useful to store and load engine parameters, especially when testing outside a UCI GUI, for ex: w/ the (fantastic tool) LittleBlitzer

to use it, it must be created, simply type:
'default' at the console prompt (this generates a fire.cfg w/ default parameters)

or, if you like to experiment:
'random' (generates a fire.cfg w/ random parameters)
'rand_eval' (generates a fire.cfg w/ random evaluation parameters)
'rand_material' (generates a fire.cfg w/ random material value parameters)
'rand_prune' (generates a fire.cfg w/ random search prune parameters)
'rand_search' (generates a fire.cfg w/ random search parameters)
'rand_time' (generates a fire.cfg w/ random time management parameters)

Best Regards,
Norm

[David Dahlem]

Hi Norm

Many thanks for Fire 2.0 xTreme. Looks good. Will a fire.cfg file created with version 2.0 work ok with version 1.5?

I notice that the historic piece sets that are in the 1.5 fire.cfg are not in the 2.0 fire.cfg.

[kranium]

Hi Norm

Many thanks for Fire 2.0 xTreme. Looks good. Will a fire.cfg file created with version 2.0 work ok with version 1.5?

I notice that the historic piece sets that are in the 1.5 fire.cfg are not in the 2.0 fire.cfg.

Hi Dave-
yes it should work just fine...

yes, i removed historic piece values...
i kinda liked them but nobody had indicated to me it was an important feature...so i decided to simplify.

[Mike S.]

Thanks!

But: Multi-pv is broken (at least in the 32-bit version, in XP with P4 cpu)

In Fritz(12), neither changing via interface (+/-) nor in the UCI options aka engine preferences has an effect on the number of analysis variations.

(Triplebase access works for me with Fire 2.0, in Fritz.)

In Arena 2.0.1, the multi-pv selection in Arena's engine context menu is greyed out. So I assume the interface doesn't get information that the engine is multi-pv capable. I can change the multi-pv number in the engine options, and then Fire 2.0 does multi-pv. But the --- line between the iterations is missing.

(I am not using a fire.cfg)

Fire 1.5 works ok here regarding multi-pv, basically (except for a Fritz problem which clearly is not Fire specific).

Otherwise, I'm looking forward to great results. The gap to Houdini 1.5a was not very big anymore...

[georgerifkin]

Thankyou! I'm currently testing Mr. Dahlem's parameters and they seems to make Fire really strong. I hope to be able to test yours soon.