Wasp 7.00 is released

[Chessqueen]

Wasp 7.00 is released and can be downloaded here:

https://waspchess.stanback.net/wasp_downloads.html

In my testing Wasp 7.00 is about 45 Elo stronger than Wasp 6.50.

The neural network for position evaluation now uses the "HalfKA" structure, with 768 PSQ inputs, 2 king zones (weights for friendly king on ranks 1-3, and for king on ranks 4-8), 1 hidden layer with 1536 neurons for "white perspective" and 1536 neurons for "black perspective", and 5 outputs with one of these selected based on material. Positions from games played during the past 18 months were added to the training data bringing the total to over 800M positions. The positions were scored with Wasp searching to depth 7 or 8. The target score for training was based 65% on this search score and 35% on the game result. I added momentum to the gradient descent routine which sped up training and gave a slight Elo boost. During training, each epoch consists of 300M positions with the weights being updated every 72K positions. Two nets with 2048 hidden layer neurons were trained for about 300 epochs each. The resulting networks were merged, trained for 30 epochs, then the network was pruned from 4096 to 3072 neurons and trained for about 200 more epochs.

Other changes since Wasp 6.50 are
- modified hash table store/probe code and hash move verification code to fix occasional crashes in TCEC games
- modified Syzygy TB probing and scoring code to fix occasional crashes in TCEC games.
- modified time management a bit
- the hash table now does store and probe for depth < 0
- store static eval in main hash table as well as in a per-thread eval hash table

John

Finally Wasp reached Stockfish 11 strength, next match will be versus Minic 3.41 64-bit 4CPU

Engine Score St Wa S-B
1: Stockfish_11_win_x64_bmi2 10.5/20 ······················································· ==110======0======1= 99.75
2: Wasp700-windows-avx 9.5/20 ==001======1======0= ······················································· 99.75

20 games played / Tournament is finished
Name of the tournament: Stockfish12 vs Wasp
Site/ Country: DESKTOP-4QNC0GS, United States
Level: Blitz 0/10
Hardware: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with 15.9 GB Memory
Operating system: Windows 10 Home Home Edition (Build 9200) 64 bit

[jstanback]

The Apple-M1 binary should work now. It can be downloaded here:

https://waspchess.stanback.net/wasp_downloads.html

John

[royb]

The Apple-M1 binary should work now. It can be downloaded here:

https://waspchess.stanback.net/wasp_downloads.html

John

Thanks John! I had to do a 'chmod +x' on the file and then give it permission to run under MacOS (a standard thing for downloaded programs) and it works great!

Thanks again!