Nu'chess chess engine

Discussion of anything and everything relating to chess playing software and machines.

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Philip
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:31 pm
Full name: Filippo marfè

Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Philip »

Hi to everyone,

After piecing back together some code i broke and adding some very naif multithreading i finally got my old chess engine to work again.
I have been lurking in this forum for uite a while but never published the engine (uci).
Just came up with the name too. Mildly vulgar pun in my native language but i doubt anyone will get it around here :D



These binaries are compiled for windows targeting my cpu, basically a skylake on a laptop (popcount / bmi )

Thanks to anyone that is interested in testing it and reporting anything back.
Cheers to everyone in this forum for their ideas, passion and interesting conversations and to those who run the place.

Regards
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Brunetti
Posts: 424
Joined: Tue Dec 08, 2009 1:37 pm
Location: Milan, Italy
Full name: Alex Brunetti

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Brunetti »

Philip wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:37 pm These binaries are compiled for windows targeting my cpu, basically a skylake on a laptop (popcount / bmi )
Hi,

can you provide a non-Skylake compile too, please?

Thanx,
Alex
Philip
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:31 pm
Full name: Filippo marfè

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Philip »



bear with me, I'm 100% a beginner so i'm not sure if i did it right. this should not try to call popcnt / bmi / sse4 instructions.

If it crashes on your machine i will ask for help on the tech part of the forum.
cheers
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Brunetti
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Location: Milan, Italy
Full name: Alex Brunetti

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Brunetti »

Philip wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 4:09 pm bear with me, I'm 100% a beginner so i'm not sure if i did it right. this should not try to call popcnt / bmi / sse4 instructions.
Well, it works. I've popcnt, sse and AVX, just not BMI.
When possible, authors publish different compiles to meet different architecture, like 32-bit, 64-nopop, 64-SSE4, 64-BMI, 64-AVX2 and so on. The more the better :)

Thanx,
Alex
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Gabor Szots
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Location: Budapest, Hungary
Full name: Gabor Szots

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Gabor Szots »

Hi Filippo,

Thanks for the engine. May I have some questions.

If this is the final release of your engine, then fine. Otherwise a version number (also displayed in the engine id when running from the command line) would make things easier.

About how strong it is by your estimate?

Are you going to publish the sources?
Gabor Szots
CCRL testing group
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Brunetti
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Location: Milan, Italy
Full name: Alex Brunetti

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Brunetti »

Gabor Szots wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:33 pm About how strong it is by your estimate?
1'+1" rating ~2930.

Alex
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Gabor Szots
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Location: Budapest, Hungary
Full name: Gabor Szots

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Gabor Szots »

Oh, and hash values are a bit confusing. Default 32 min 1 but no max?
Gabor Szots
CCRL testing group
Philip
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:31 pm
Full name: Filippo marfè

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Philip »

Gabor Szots wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:33 pm Hi Filippo,

Thanks for the engine. May I have some questions.

If this is the final release of your engine, then fine. Otherwise a version number (also displayed in the engine id when running from the command line) would make things easier.

About how strong it is by your estimate?

Are you going to publish the sources?
Should be in the 2900 elo range single threaded. Couldn't test on more CPU and that s what I would be interested to see.
I will add some version in the cmd line, I hope to keep fooling around with this thing eventually. Thanks for pointing that out.
About the source code, I should clean it out before doing that. It is full of comments to myself, including swearing, functions to print various things pointing to private folders on my HDD and a lot of other weird stuff, funny variables names and so on. I'll do it when I have some time if it can be of any use.
Tbh, with all the excellent code available online I don't know how mine would be of any interest.
...Oh, and hash values are a bit confusing. Default 32 min 1 but no max?
I didn't notice that. Maybe I didn't know what to put in there. The maximum size of hash table depends on how much memory is available on your os, or am I missing something?

Cheers
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Gabor Szots
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Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Gabor Szots »

Other engines do this:
option name Hash type spin default x min y max z
.

Available memory does not matter. The user shall make sure not to exceed it by setting a suitable hash size.
Gabor Szots
CCRL testing group
Philip
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:31 pm
Full name: Filippo marfè

Re: Nu'chess chess engine

Post by Philip »

A quick search on microsoft's site showed me that you can, indeed, query windows for available memory. I fixed that and put in some version number


no popcnt

cheers