CCT10 Crafty release postponed?

[jarkkop]

Bob, I don't see the recent CCT10 Crafty in your FTP site there yet. You said that it would be released right after the tournament.

Just anxious

Jarkko Pesonen

[Tony Thomas]

With all the new releases, I would say Bob should wait if he wants non-crafty fans to play with his engine. On the other hand he probably played a million games already with the new version that he doesnt really care if anyone plays with it or not.

[bob]

Bob, I don't see the recent CCT10 Crafty in your FTP site there yet. You said that it would be released right after the tournament.

Just anxious

Jarkko Pesonen

Here is where we are. I have almost finished 22.0. This will have a couple of eval tweaks, but the main thing is it is significantly smaller. The white/black duplication in evaluate.c, movgen.c, make.c, etc no longer exists. I lack one module, EvaluatePassedPawnRaces() which will be done within a day or two. We have been discussing this and we plan on releasing version 22.0 as soon as that is done. We have not been doing many changes because this has shredded a lot of code and I have been carefully testing because these changes are very significant. I am running about 1,200 positions searched to fixed depth, and require that _every_ position match the pre-22.0 version node counts exactly.

I will post a note here this week when it is ready, as we want to get this out so we can resume making changes that will affect its playing strength.

I will note that this version is a bit faster, probably due to reduced cache footprint, and a little code was cleaned up here and there. I plan on continuing the clean-up since it is now about 1/2 the work, not having to change both the black and then the white code. So the first few 22.0 versions will each be cleaner than the last, in addition to having new ideas included. I am really working toward going thru every "kernel" module (the stuff used within the search) with a fine-toothed comb to look for bugs, or improvements.

It will definitely be out this week, once I get this last module done. To date, we are lighter by about 3,500 lines of code, with another 200+ getting removed from this last module...

[bob]

With all the new releases, I would say Bob should wait if he wants non-crafty fans to play with his engine. On the other hand he probably played a million games already with the new version that he doesnt really care if anyone plays with it or not.

I only release things because I said I would years ago, and intend on continuing that. Yes, I play a few games here and there during testing.

This version finally is beginning to look like something that I would claim to be associated with in a public forum. Older versions had gotten _very_ messy with the code duplication...

[Martin Thoresen]

Bob,

Are you implementing the "fix" for running multiple threads? Which was mentioned for Crafty 21.7 so that we can run for example 4 threads without Crafty pondering on the opponents time.

[Tony Thomas]

Bob,

Are you implementing the "fix" for running multiple threads? Which was mentioned for Crafty 21.7 so that we can run for example 4 threads without Crafty pondering on the opponents time.

Didnt he advice about a quick fix change that you can make in the .rc file?

[bob]

Bob,

Are you implementing the "fix" for running multiple threads? Which was mentioned for Crafty 21.7 so that we can run for example 4 threads without Crafty pondering on the opponents time.

Yes, that is in. I am not sure how it is turned on/off, but the fix is in and has been tested. Only one proviso: I would _not_ use this on 1 0 type games. Because Crafty's clock is running when it does the fork() to create the new processes and that is a significant time cost that is buried in Crafty's search time. But for reasonable time controls, it works fine, terminating and re-starting the processes as needed so that if it is not pondering, it is not using any CPU time at all...

edit:

Just checked. You will need to add "smpnice=1" to your crafty.rc/.craftyrc for that fix to work. The default is smpnice=0 so that it behaves as it does at present...

I may well make "smpnice=1" the default since that is probably better for normal users...

[Martin Thoresen]

Yes, that is in. I am not sure how it is turned on/off, but the fix is in and has been tested. Only one proviso: I would _not_ use this on 1 0 type games. Because Crafty's clock is running when it does the fork() to create the new processes and that is a significant time cost that is buried in Crafty's search time. But for reasonable time controls, it works fine, terminating and re-starting the processes as needed so that if it is not pondering, it is not using any CPU time at all...

edit:

Just checked. You will need to add "smpnice=1" to your crafty.rc/.craftyrc for that fix to work. The default is smpnice=0 so that it behaves as it does at present...

I may well make "smpnice=1" the default since that is probably better for normal users...

Aha, so basically that line of code in the .rc file will make the existing 21.6 work as described too?

I never run anything faster than 3+1 though, but mostly 40/40 repeating.

Thanks,
-Martin

[bob]

Yes, that is in. I am not sure how it is turned on/off, but the fix is in and has been tested. Only one proviso: I would _not_ use this on 1 0 type games. Because Crafty's clock is running when it does the fork() to create the new processes and that is a significant time cost that is buried in Crafty's search time. But for reasonable time controls, it works fine, terminating and re-starting the processes as needed so that if it is not pondering, it is not using any CPU time at all...

edit:

Just checked. You will need to add "smpnice=1" to your crafty.rc/.craftyrc for that fix to work. The default is smpnice=0 so that it behaves as it does at present...

I may well make "smpnice=1" the default since that is probably better for normal users...

Aha, so basically that line of code in the .rc file will make the existing 21.6 work as described too?

I never run anything faster than 3+1 though, but mostly 40/40 repeating.

Thanks,
-Martin

I do not think it is in 21.6. It was in some 21.7 versions we sent out to a few for testing, but I do not believe it was in 21.6. Easiest way to test is to start it up and type the "smpnice=1" and see if it gripes or not... If it complains, you know it is not present there. It definitely works in 22.0 although I did make a change that ignores it if pondering is enabled, as it makes no sense to stop and restart the processes that often if pondering is allowable. But with no pondering, the processes die between searches so that it has no CPU usage unless it is actually thinking...

[BBauer]

Hi Bob,
I was always thinking that the 64-bit version of crafty should be stronger
than the 32-bit version. From results of some testers I am not shure now.
Did those testers something wrong?
kind regards
Bernhard