Brute Force?

[Werewolf]

Is there any chess engine that does a pure brute force search without any extensions etc etc on top?

[Brunetti]

Is there any chess engine that does a pure brute force search without any extensions etc etc on top?

Hi,
There might be a few, some early, test, or older versions. But they certainly perform very poorly: without reductions, depths greater than 8-10 can't be reached in reasonable time.

Alex

[Werewolf]

That’s fine. It’s not for max Elo, but doing my own study of Elo gain going to deeper depths.

Do we know of such an engine..?

[Brunetti]

Do we know of such an engine..?

Hello,
I knew that by answering this question, I would get myself into trouble I can't quickly find one; I think the easiest way is to recompile a known engine. I chose Fruit 2.1 because it's extremely easy to understand and modify. I removed everything except the transposition table to essentially make it a brute force engine. With a quick test, I found that it lost about 300 rating points. In my download page, you can find a zip with the source files I modified and the compiled version for Windows.

Alex

[gordonr]

Do we know of such an engine..?

Hello,
I knew that by answering this question, I would get myself into trouble I can't quickly find one; I think the easiest way is to recompile a known engine. I chose Fruit 2.1 because it's extremely easy to understand and modify. I removed everything except the transposition table to essentially make it a brute force engine. With a quick test, I found that it lost about 300 rating points. In my download page, you can find a zip with the source files I modified and the compiled version for Windows.

Alex

Thanks for providing this. So if I've understood correctly, it's still using alpha beta but no quiescent search?

[Brunetti]

Thanks for providing this. So if I've understood correctly, it's still using alpha beta but no quiescent search?

No, it also uses quiescent search. What I removed are all types of reductions and extensions, null move, and similar. The source code is quite clear even for a very inexperienced programmer. I'm not sure if we want to consider quiescent search as a type of extension, but if you remove it, you'll completely ruin the search and likely lose another 200 to 300 Elo easily.

Alex

[Werewolf]

Thanks so much for doing this.

I've actually started writing my own chess engine with the following criteria:

- Pure Brute Force with nothing else whatsoever
- Primative E.F
- Multithreaded
- UCI

However, given I last programmed something in ForTran77, this could take a while....

[Rom77]

Is there any chess engine that does a pure brute force search without any extensions etc etc on top?

Check out Murka 1.2 by Igor Korshunov (WildCat). Full brute force. Negamax without QS:
https://transfiles.ru/25z2c

[Viz]

SimpleSearch is more or less it, pure alpha-beta with SF NNUE.

[JVMerlino]

SimpleSearch is more or less it, pure alpha-beta with SF NNUE.

Is the code available for SimpleSearch? I can't find it anywhere....