Laser 1.6 Release

[jeffreyan11]

Laser 1.6 has now been released and is available at
https://github.com/jeffreyan11/uci-ches ... s/tag/v1.6

Self-play regressions:
+151 in 12000 games at 3+0.02
+151 in 12000 games at 15+0.05

Estimated CCRL elo is 3180

Major changes:
Search and evaluation tweaks
SMP rewrite
Time management rewrite

[Guenther]

Thanks Jeffrey. That selfplay improvement looks gorgeous.

[AndrewGrant]

Thanks, Jeffrey.

My testing says your last few time control changes have a big impact at STC

[CMCanavessi]

Great release, awesome improvement over 1.5!

Will definitely get to the Elite League and stay there this season... hopefully.

[Graham Banks]

Thanks Jeffrey. Fantastic progress!

[Dokterchen]

Awesome! Thanks Jeffrey

[Dariusz]

Good news! Thank You Jeffrey

[Damir]

Awesome work. Thx Jeffrey.

[CMCanavessi]

Laser 1.6 has now been released and is available at
https://github.com/jeffreyan11/uci-ches ... s/tag/v1.6

Self-play regressions:
+151 in 12000 games at 3+0.02
+151 in 12000 games at 15+0.05

Estimated CCRL elo is 3180

Major changes:
Search and evaluation tweaks
SMP rewrite
Time management rewrite

Hi Jeffrey, I've benchmarked all 3 versions and something looks suspicious with the BMI2 and the Popcount version. They have almost the same speed, which on a Ryzen processor is kind of nonsense due to the BMI2 bug, so either the BMI2 is not using BMI2, or the Popcount version is also using BMI2 and running slower than it should. The Nopopcount version is the slower of them all, as expected. Usually with other engines, the Popcount version is much faster. Maybe you can check that, or others can also test and see if they find the same?

I'll post benchmarks later.

[AndrewGrant]

Laser 1.6 has now been released and is available at
https://github.com/jeffreyan11/uci-ches ... s/tag/v1.6

Self-play regressions:
+151 in 12000 games at 3+0.02
+151 in 12000 games at 15+0.05

Estimated CCRL elo is 3180

Major changes:
Search and evaluation tweaks
SMP rewrite
Time management rewrite

Hi Jeffrey, I've benchmarked all 3 versions and something looks suspicious with the BMI2 and the Popcount version. They have almost the same speed, which on a Ryzen processor is kind of nonsense due to the BMI2 bug, so either the BMI2 is not using BMI2, or the Popcount version is also using BMI2 and running slower than it should. The Nopopcount version is the slower of them all, as expected. Usually with other engines, the Popcount version is much faster. Maybe you can check that, or others can also test and see if they find the same?

I'll post benchmarks later.

Laser does not have BMI2/PEXT support in the sense that most expect. Usually this implies replacing the multiplication shift and step of the magic bitboard computation with a single pext instruction. Jeffrey has not done this. Here is this BMI2 support patch
, which just assumes you have haswell architecture, which is still a speedup I presume.