Thanks Morgan. I've already uploaded my first games* so I it is going to appear on our blitz list this tomorrow.
*Günther reported it in the new engines thread so I was already aware of its existence.
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Thanks Morgan. I've already uploaded my first games* so I it is going to appear on our blitz list this tomorrow.
Hi Gabor,Gabor Szots wrote: ↑Fri Dec 18, 2020 12:40 pmThanks Morgan. I've already uploaded my first games* so I it is going to appear on our blitz list this tomorrow.
*Günther reported it in the new engines thread so I was already aware of its existence.
Yes, I have. I installed Stash 25 under Arena by making a copy of Stash 21 and renaming it. Only, I forgot to change the executables...
Ha, I was watching your repo and the progress and just some minutes ago I saw the change from 27.11 to 27.12 and thought,mhouppin wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:50 pm Hi there, version 28 is out ! Here are the improvements made:
- Removed some redundant code for TT filling;
- Added Knight Outposts to the eval (with additional bonuses for supported Outposts and Outposts on center files);
- Added Shielded minors to the eval (minor pieces with a friendly pawn just above them);
- Added a specialized function to score King + mating material versus lone King (including a KBNK helper);
- Raised Pawn Table cache size, now resetting it only when a new game is started;
- Increased History scores' granularity;
- Changed Passed Pawns' detection to also include Candidate Passers;
- Changed LMR conditions from "not when in check" to "not for a capture or promotion";
- Disabled NMP when the side to move has no pieces left(since there is a high risk of zugzwang);
- Adjusted LMR based on the move history;
- Added Singular Extensions in search;
- Some minor changes to make the engine faster.
This version also has a faster bitboard initialisation (I simply changed the initial seed used to generate magic bitboards), a single PV search function (I merged the one used for root nodes), a smaller movegen code (using some more generic functions) and a cleaner IID function (I moved the code used to print the PV to a new function).
This version scored +55 Elo against version 27. Getting there took me 40 days, and it is a pleasure to see there is still a lot of room for improvements. Hopefully I can get the next version under two months ^^
The release binaries are available here: https://gitlab.com/mhouppin/stash-bot/-/releases/v28.0
Good evening to everyone !
Hi Guenther, thanks for the support ! Yeah, this is probably the version that took me the most work: 11 Elo gainers, 59 test runs, and ~2700 line edits... I still thank all the OpenBench developers and contributors for their support and their hardware, without them I wouldn't have had a new version before months !
Congratulations for your efforts! Steady progress. It is also nice to see your plans for the future.mhouppin wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:14 pmI already have patch ideas for the next version, I still need to work a lot on the eval (King Safety seems to be one of the weak points of Stash, I'm working on fixing it).
Since I saw a conversation in another thread about Stash getting NNUE, I will say that I haven't planned adding any neural network technology to the engine yet, because I'm still studying machine learning in my school projects. I will however very likely take a look at this once I will be able to write my own inference code and training process.