LTC Progression test
Elo | 24.85 +- 3.17 (95%)
Conf | 60.0+0.60s Threads=1 Hash=64MB
Games | N: 5000 W: 518 L: 161 D: 4321
Penta | [0, 104, 1946, 439, 11]
Progression test was run on the 8moves_v3.epd book.
Search Changes
- Improved RFP
- Improved NMP
- Introduced Pawn, non-Pawn, and continuation Corrhist
- Introduced Complexity based LMR scaling
- Introduced Root History
- Improved 3fold repetition detection
- Improved SEE mode ordering
Eval Changes
- The net shipped with this release has a new arch, the L1 size was increased to 2048, resulting in a final arch of
(768->2048)x2->1x8. Horizontal mirroring was introduced, improving the net strength without increasing its size. - Weights are now clipped at +- 1.414 allowing for better quantization.
- The eval code has been reworked and the eval update is now fully lazy, resulting in improved speed (given the same net size)
- Introduced an evaluation grain of 16.
TM Changes
- Introduced Eval stability TM.
Misc stuff
- The engine has a better and more efficient handling of input and output buffers.
- The TT and its buckets were aligned resulting in greater speed.
- The engine will now print a final info line with the best up to date info possible when stopping the search.
New Contributors
A special thanks to every new contributor that joined in this release cycle, it's safe to say this binary wouldn't be out as it is now without their help: Thanks to Cie for embarking on an Alex corrhist journey, thanks to Shawn for several search improvements and thanks to Joe for being my favourite (ex) SF server discord member (and for some very nifty cleanups).
Me thanking more people
As usual a big thank you to anyone who contributed to Alex, the already mentioned new faces and any other long time contributor or co-author of mine and to any and all SWE members.
A special thanks to all the people that supplied Alex with some very important hardware for patch testing, the engine wouldn't be here without that.
As per tradition the Alex project would like to officially state we don't like Viren.
The future of the engine
The name picked for this release is 7.1, it's not a round number because this is most likely not the final version of the engine, while i've grown old and a bit tired of chasing Elo there's some fun stuff we never got to explore in Alex out of self-imposed limits. Expect in the (not so near) future a version with king buckets ready to fill y'all hard drives.
Full Changelog: v7.0.0...v7.1.0