New engine: Vengeance

[amarthapa]

Hi all, check out my new engine. I developed it for a few years during my off time and I am happy to announce the initial release.

I expect it to be around 2700.

Link to the source code -> https://bitbucket.org/amarthapa/vengeance/src

Thanks.

[jorose]

Congratulations on your release!

I was able to compile it without issues on my Linux device. I ran a quick game against Winter and it ran without issues at 1+1 time control.

I noticed you have both handcrafted and NNUE evaluation, but from what I can tell you are only using the handcrafted eval?

[amarthapa]

Thanks. Yes, initially I thought of using NNUE because of the complexity around king safety and issues related to tuning it. But NNUE turned out to be another can of worms. Especially the data for training a net was not readily available so I turned my focus back to classical evaluation and spent some time understanding king safety.

So as a result, I settled with an extended form of PSQT which is a little improvement over traditional PSQT. Therefore NNUE is on hold right but the repository still has some NNUE code. While I don't use NNUE currently for evaluation, I have kept it for future use.

[jorose]

Yes, NNUE is definitely its own can of worms.

I think new HCE engines are also a welcome sight, as currently, NNUE engines are a dime a dozen.

[amarthapa]

Yes. It is definitely a refreshing change. The only down side i see is the cuber some way a developer has to do HCE. It also has more potential for bugs as compared to NNUE.

[algerbrex]

Congrats on the engine release! I had no problems compiling it on my Windows setup and played a few games between it and Blunder 8.5.5, and ran a little testing, and it looks like they're pretty evenly matched at a cursor glance. So looks like your engine will be a good sparing partner for mine in the future

[amarthapa]

Thanks. I will be testing some games with Blunder as well. Best of luck on your development.

[lithander]

Congratz on version 1.0! Leorik is also around 2700! I'm going to run a friendly sparring match when time allows it

[amarthapa]

Thanks. Will be doing the same.

[amarthapa]

Version 2.0 is out. Link - https://bitbucket.org/amarthapa/vengeance/src/main/.