SlowChess Blitz Classic 2.0

[jonkr]

Would you be willing to run a test with all NNs enabled vs all NNs disabled, to get the cumulative impact?

I'll run an overnight test. I'm assuming you mean normal start positions, so : 8-moves book, 15s + .15, 2.4 with nets vs 2.4 no nets. I'll post results tomorrow.

I think almost all the elo gain is in the endgame nets but haven't verified that. Probably something like 8-moves book self-play is one of the best cases for showing late endgame improvements. Even if it is near +20, that still amounts to less than half an elo gained per day overall, and probably less than 1 elo per day even in the general endgames.epd starting positions. If I hadn't broken it down into the individual small endgame suites in the beginning I wouldn't have known it was working, except to go from very bad to passable after some training. So I decided to take a break even though it was working since it would take quite some time (in my initial excitement I had ideas of reaching the limits of training the endgame nets and finding optimal structures and processes, then working my way back toward the midgame then opening, but the space grows much bigger quickly.)

[AndrewGrant]

Would you be willing to run a test with all NNs enabled vs all NNs disabled, to get the cumulative impact?

I'll run an overnight test. I'm assuming you mean normal start positions, so : 8-moves book, 15s + .15, 2.4 with nets vs 2.4 no nets. I'll post results tomorrow.

I think almost all the elo gain is in the endgame nets but haven't verified that. Probably something like 8-moves book self-play is one of the best cases for showing late endgame improvements. Even if it is near +20, that still amounts to less than half an elo gained per day overall, and probably less than 1 elo per day even in the general endgames.epd starting positions. If I hadn't broken it down into the individual small endgame suites in the beginning I wouldn't have known it was working, except to go from very bad to passable after some training. So I decided to take a break even though it was working since it would take quite some time (in my initial excitement I had ideas of reaching the limits of training the endgame nets and finding optimal structures and processes, then working my way back toward the midgame then opening, but the space grows much bigger quickly.)

The other question is how are you training them? Some dirty Pytorch script? I have a tool I could offer you (privately) that might let you train nets quite a bit faster than Pytorch, maybe 8x to 16x Faster, which could help you get a few more elo out of it.

[jonkr]

The test results :
7000 games 15s + .15 EndgameNets (+20.4 elo) 1370-957-4673

It's enough to say that the gain was mainly the nets, since this was same .exe with nets vs without. (The error bar still pretty high, 2.4 vs 2.3 exact score was +20.8 elo, and I had already run a another endgame net re-tuning since that one, so not an exact comparison.)

I'm using a tensorflow script to train the weights. Probably 98% of the time is running the matches to generate the scored positions (and test for progress), so I didn't bother setting up the GPU support even. Also I'm already out of chess mode now. So it's probably not worth any bother, although the vagueness of the statement makes it sound interesting to see what it is

If I decide I want to try to gain elo I probably should look at how NNUE is trained to figure out why people can do it quicker, I'm guessing there's some large file(s) people download with lots of varied positions, and if the initial eval is good enough doing searches to score ends up much quicker at refining/passing evaluations around than playing new games and using results, and starting with everything covered by a general net is best to pickup most important features for elo (although the specific smaller endgame nets I'm pretty sure should have some gain over 1 general net, since with good data they can put the same or more info into a faster calculation when covering a smaller gamespace.) When I was doing the endgame nets I wanted specifically to test learning starting from no data and no evaluation. Having skilled opponents maybe pretty big shortcut, but being able to beat an opponent trained against shows the learning is pretty decent.

[ThatsIt]

Hi,

SlowChess 2.4 always disconnects under cutechess-cli100, under the Shredder Classic GUI Slow Chess does nothing. I've tried several things, for example BookEnabled=0, no success.
Any ideas?

Best wishes,
G.S.
(CEGT team)

[Krzysztof Grzelak]

Under Shredder Classic 5 the engine is working fine.

[ThatsIt]

Under Shredder Classic 5 the engine is working fine.

Till version 2.3 "slow64.exe" runs very well on two older PCs,
Intel i5 and Intel m5. Since version 2.4 only "slow64-noPop.exe"
works fine on these two PCs ? Both with OS Windows 10 home.

Best wishes,
G.S.
(CEGT team)

[Guenther]

Under Shredder Classic 5 the engine is working fine.

Till version 2.3 "slow64.exe" runs very well on two older PCs,
Intel i5 and Intel m5. Since version 2.4 only "slow64-noPop.exe"
works fine on these two PCs ? Both with OS Windows 10 home.

Best wishes,
G.S.
(CEGT team)

Sounds like it uses now CPU instructions for the default version you don't have.
Does it crash from cmd (simply start the exe itself)?

[pohl4711]

Hi,

SlowChess 2.4 always disconnects under cutechess-cli100, under the Shredder Classic GUI Slow Chess does nothing. I've tried several things, for example BookEnabled=0, no success.
Any ideas?

Best wishes,
G.S.
(CEGT team)

Try cutechess-cli 1.1.0. I use it and played 7000 games with Slow Chess 2.4 without any problems. You can download the binary from my website:
https://www.sp-cc.de/files/cutechess-cli_190724.zip

(As far as I know, the first version, which can play gauntlets, playing an opening-set sequentially versus all opponent engines with repeated colors. Perfect for ratinglist tests of new engines.)

[ThatsIt]

Sounds like it uses now CPU instructions for the default version you don't have.

Thats my guess too.

Does it crash from cmd (simply start the exe itself)?

Slow Chess 2.4 starts with his/her own GUI, but doesn't calculate.

I will try it out on my newer PCs soon.

Best wishes,
G.S.
(CEGT team)

[ThatsIt]

Try cutechess-cli 1.1.0. I use it and played 7000 games with Slow Chess 2.4 without any problems. You can download the binary from my website:
https://www.sp-cc.de/files/cutechess-cli_190724.zip

(As far as I know, the first version, which can play gauntlets, playing an opening-set sequentially versus all opponent engines with repeated colors. Perfect for ratinglist tests of new engines.)

I use 1.1.0 already.
The "non popcount version" runs very well on these old machines.

Best wishes,
G.S.
(CEGT team)