Engine Release: Valiant

[Enderjed]

What's Valiant's strongest time control? It kind of struggled when I put it in a 30 seconds + 0.5 sec increment match

I just use what BanksiaGUI defaulted to:
Standard
Time: 5 Minute
For Moves: 40
Increment 1 sec
Margin per move 5 sec

[Enderjed]

Valiant Mk6 has been released to the dropbox
With some assistance from the Engine Programming discord, the engine now has a toggle to completely invert on how it evaluates the board, in a method that imitates Tom7's WorstFish. There is also a separate logo to denote the usage of this mode. This overall feature was added mostly for the sake of research, but could be seen as an act of humour.
The source of Mk6 is still included with the build; in the off chance you want to take a look at the code.

[Enderjed]

A severe crashing bug has been found in Mk6, this bug has been hotfixed, please download the revised Mk6 version.

[Enderjed]

Dropbox folder has been updated with failed sources to Mk7 and a Mk5 variant.
Don't expect anymore releases of Valiant, as python is too slow, and I'm too mentally dense to comprehend other languages.
Do what you will with the mess that I made.

[Enderjed]

After extensive testing and debugging, Mk8 has finally been released on the Dropbox.

The search has been greatly improved overall, allowing for depths of up to 8. Response times have also been accelerated, allowing the engine to survive mildly better in harsher allotted timeframes.

The engine has been proven to be able to beat stronger opposition, such as Hanzo The Razor, Iota, multiple Fidelity Chess Challengers, and Monchestor
Furthermore, it can beat weaker opponents that it was equal with, Such as Mephisto I, CM:XI (with personality "sop" at 56 or less) and LittleLeLouch far more consistently.
The primary change in direct terms of play is that the opening is generally stronger, but the endgame has been somewhat weakened.
Considering that Mk6 was rated to be 1956 Elo and Mk3.2 was rated to be 1902, I predict that Mk8 is roughly 1940-2050

A plan for Mk9 is mostly just to have the engine respond better to multiple threads, and have it print mate scores (eg. M-5), because trying to get anything else would be highly optimistic and unreasonable.

[Sylwy]

I seem to be unable to run it in Arena, it loads the engine just fine and starts it up but then nothing happens - no output or anything. Do I have to do anything special to make it work?

1. Is the .exe in a folder called "build" ?(without the quotation marks) as it for some reason won't work without it.

2. I do apologise but Valiant is untested on Arena, it's only been tested on Win11 BanksiaGUI.

Hi !

Just discovered your Python chess engine (Valiant Mk8). Works perfectly in Arena 3.5.1 GUI. Thank you !

[Enderjed]

I seem to be unable to run it in Arena, it loads the engine just fine and starts it up but then nothing happens - no output or anything. Do I have to do anything special to make it work?

1. Is the .exe in a folder called "build" ?(without the quotation marks) as it for some reason won't work without it.

2. I do apologise but Valiant is untested on Arena, it's only been tested on Win11 BanksiaGUI.

Hi !

Just discovered your Python chess engine (Valiant Mk8). Works perfectly in Arena 3.5.1 GUI. Thank you !

Considering the fact it only worked on BanksiaGUI on testing on my own machine (and later cutechess, but that would have some bugs involving the internal turn counter, but it never worked on Arena), that is impressive.