Tips and Tricks using Honey (and Stockfish)

[MikeB]

I expect SF developers and others are quite familiar with this feature ... but some of you will not be.

When using the Honey engines ( or Stockfish) , you may also run benches beside just using "depth"
You may also use movetime, nodes , and mate.

As an example, here is a link to 462 well known and high quality mate -in 4's collected by Bill Harvey

Note: The download contains only the fens, the Bill Harvey link tells also tell you month /year, source and solution ( some have multiple solutions) for each Mate-in-4.

With a Honey engine, using Harmon here:
Here is the command:
Har*.exe b 2048 64 4 true eval.bin m4.fen mate

When the mate tag is used, Honey will run until it finds the mate in 4 , Note: If mate in 4 is not found , it will run forever!
For Honey , engines, true means use NN Evaluation ( false is classical) and eval.bin is the default name for the nn file (embedded here, but it doesnt have to be). Stockfish will work a little differently .

So here, Harmon on my 3970x Workstation solved all 462 mates in 4 in 6.6 seconds , while averaging 125M /nps

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Total time (ms) : 6606 -
Nodes searched : 828180972

Nodes/second : 125367k

My Ryzen 9 Asus Laptop , running the same command with the same exe:

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Total time (ms) : 16232 > obviously longer time wise
Nodes searched : 596203385 > but in fewer nodes

Nodes/second : 36730k


Here is another example using movetime with the default bench positions wit the 3970x
Har*.exe b 2048 64 500 true eval.bin default movetime
The 500 is in milleseconds ( 1/2 second per position)

=================================
Total time (ms) : 47687
Nodes searched : 5641637795

Nodes/second : 118305k

and with the Ryzen 9 laptop:

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Total time (ms) : 49895
Nodes searched : 169716743

Nodes/second : 34014k

I have update coming soon - 13.1b - mostly minor fixes.