In this case we try a rather drastic
approach: we simply don't futility prune
in qsearch when arriving from a null move.
So we save evaluating and also save to mess
with eval margins at all because margin is used
only in futility.
Also accuracy should not be affected, actually it
improves because we don't prune anything anymore.
bench: 5404066
Performs well at very short TC of 40/4+0.05 (courtesy of Jean-Francois):
Wins: 2503 Losses: 2146 Draws: 5581 Total: 10230 +12 ELO
But is poor at longer TC of 20"+0.05
Wins: 321 Losses: 373 Draws: 1141 Total: 1808 -10 ELO
The patch was clearly a tradoff between speed and accuracy and
the most interesting part of it are test results that can be
commented as follows:
- A short TC is very sensible to any speed increase
- A longer TC is more sensible to accuracy and less to speed
So a patch that does not change speed is suitable to be tested at
short TC, while a speed/accuracy compromise patch is IMO better to
be tested at longer TC to verify loss of accuracy can be tolerated.
In this case the revert is only temporary. We will come back again
once we will be able to preserve the evaluation margin.
bench: 5809010
Reuse the evaluation of the parent with inverted sign and
set margin to zero (this is an hack!).
This is done only in qsearch where almost 15% of calls are
from a null move. In normal search the number of nodes where
(ss-1)->currentMove == MOVE_NULL
is almost zero and so there is no need of using this trick.
The big advantage of this patch is a speed-up due to skipped
evaluate() calls, that are very costly.
Functionality is of course affected and we will need to proper
test it later. For now we just register a 3-4% speed up.
Suggested by Hongzhi Cheng.
bench: 5051328
When testing if a move blocks the threat path there is no
reason to require the threat to be a slider. Indeed threat
can be a double pawn push like in this example:
r1bq1rk1/ppp1np1p/4n1p1/3p4/3P2Q1/2P1B3/PPBN2PP/R4RK1 w - - 0 16
Where white's move Rf6 blocks the threat f5.
As a nice side effect we can retire the now useless helper
piece_is_slider().
This patch kicks in only very rare cases, indeed the bench is
still the same!
bench: 5809010
There is no guarantee that split() consumes all the node's
moves. Indeed split() can return without performing any job
for instance because MAX_SPLITPOINTS_PER_THREAD is reached
or becuase no available threads are found (this latter case
is much more common).
So search must continue in those cases and we cannot force
exiting from move's loop.
Bug introduced by 1ac417edb8 of 5/10/2012
Spotted by Frank Genot.
No functional change.
If a previous move attacks the king (with the piece
of the threat move removed) then must be a discovered
check, otherwise it means that first move gave check
and we were not able to do a null move.
Also renamed stuff to better document the function's
context.
No functional change.
When testing if a piece is moving through the squares
vacated by a previous move there is no reason to require
the piece to be a slider, indeed we can have a double
pawn push like in this example:
r1q2rk1/2p1bppp/2Pp4/pN5b/Q1P1p3/4B2P/PP1R1PP1/1K5R w - - 3 18
Where black's move f5 is connected to previous move Be7 that
frees the path.
Or we can have a castle move:
r1bqkb1r/pppp1ppp/2n1pn2/1B6/4P3/2N2N2/PPPP1PPP/R1BQK2R b KQkq - 5 1
Where a previous move Bb5 allows the white to castle king side.
This time patch is mine ;-)
new bench: 5809010
We send to GUI multi-pv info after each cycle,
not just once at the end of the PV loop. This is
because at high depths a single root search can
be very slow and we want to update the gui as
soon as we have a new PV score.
Idea is good but implementation is broken because
sort() takes as arguments a pointer to the first
element and one past the last element.
So fix the bug and rename sort arguments to better
reflect their meaning.
Another hit by Hongzhi Cheng. Impressive!
No functional change.
When checking if the moving piece p1 in a previous
move m1 defends the destination square of a move m2
we have to use the occupancy with the from square of
m2 removed so to take in account the case in which
f2 will block an x-ray attack from p1.
For instance in this position:
r2k3r/p1pp1pb1/qn3np1/1N2P3/1p3P2/2B5/PPP3QP/R3K2R b KQ - 1 9
The move eXf6 is connected to the previous move Bc3 that
defends the destination square f6.
With this patch we have about 10% more moves detected as
'connected'. Anyhow the absolute number is very low, about
4000 more moves out of 6M nodes searched.
Another issue spotted by Hongzhi "Hawk Eye" Cheng ;-)
new bench: 5757373
On Intel, perhaps due to 'lea' instruction this way of
zeroing the lsb of *b seems faster than a shift+negate.
On perft (where any speed difference is magnified) I
got a 6% speed up on my Intel i5 64bit.
Suggested by Hongzhi Cheng.
No functional change.
Compiler complies that 'cnt' is initialized but
unused (in !CheckThreeFold case). Moving the
definition of 'cnt'out of the loop seems to do
the trick.
No functional change.
Instead of use a variable so to resolve many conditions
already at compile time. In quiesce is also where we
have most of the InCheck nodes and is one of the most
performance critical code paths.
Speed up of 1.5% with Clang and 1% with gcc
Suggested by Hongzhi Cheng.
No functional change.
When checking if a move defends the threatened piece
we correctly remove from the occupancy bitboard the
moved piece. This patch removes from the occupancy also
the threatening piece so to consider the cases of moves
that defend the threatened piece x-raying through the
threat move.
As example in this position:
r3k2r/p1ppqp2/Bn4p1/3p1n2/4P1N1/5Q1P/PPP2P1P/R3K2R w KQkq - 1 10
The threat black move is dxe4. With this patch we include
(and so don't prune) white's Bb7 that would be pruned otherwise.
The number of affected position is very low, around 1% of cases,
so we don't expect ELO changes, neverthless this is the logical
and natural thing to do.
Patch suggested by Hongzhicheng.
new bench: 5323798
ReducedStateInfo is a redundant struct that is also
prone to errors, indeed must be updated any time is
updated StateInfo. It is a trick to partial copy a
StateInfo object in do_move().
This patch takes advantage of builtin macro offsetof()
to directly calculate the number of quad words to copy.
Note that we still use memcpy to do the actual job of
copying the (48 bytes) of data.
Idea by Richard Vida.
No functional and no performance change.
Only in not performance critical code like pretty_pv(),
otherwise continue to use the good old C-style arrays
like in extract/insert PV where I have done some code
refactoring anyhow.
No functional change.
Silly typo (introduced in e304db9d1e) completely
messed up move notation in case of promotions causing
"Illegal move" warning in cutechess-cli.
Reported by Jörg Oster.
No functional change.
In multi-threads runs with debug on we experience some
asserts due to the fact that TT access is intrinsecally
racy and its contents cannot be always trusted so must
be validated before to be used and this is what the
patch does.
No functional case.
And restore old behaviour of not returning from a RootNode
without updating RootMoves[].
Also renamed is_draw() template parameters to reflect a
'positive' logic (Check instead of Skip) that is easier
to follow.
New bench: 5312693
When signal 'stop' is raised we return bestValue
that could be still set at -VALUE_INFINITE and
this triggers an assert. Fix it by returning
a value we know for sure is not +-VALUE_INFINITE.
Reported by 平岡拓也 Hiraoka.
No functional change.
Note that the actual pickup is done in the class
d'tor so to be sure it is always triggered, even
in case of a sudden exit due to a 'stop' signal.
No functional change.
Function move_to_san() requires the Position to be
passed by referenced because a do/undo move is done
inside the function to detect a possible mate and to
add to the san string the corresponding '#' suffix.
Instead of passing a copy of current position pass
directly the original position object after const
casting it. This has the advantage to avoid a costly
Position copy, on the down side a bench test could
report different searched nodes if print(move) is
used, due to the additionals do_move() calls.
No functional change.
Existing Makefile is buggy for PowerPC, it has no
SSE, yet it is given it if Prefetch is enabled,
because it isn't ARMv7.
Patch from Matthew Brades.
No functional change.
We can have ttValue == VALUE_NONE when we use a TT
slot to just save a position static evaluation, but
in this case we also save DEPTH_NONE so to avoid
using the ttValue in search. This happens to work,
but due to a number of lucky and tricky cases that
we now documnet through a bunch of asserts and a
little change to value_from_tt() that has no real
effect but clarifing the code.
No functional change.
On some platforms 128 MB of RAM for TT is too much,
so run 'bench' with the default 32 MB size.
No functional change although of course now 'bench'
reports a different number: 5545018
Use popcount() instead in the only calling place.
It is used only at initialization so there is no
speed regression and anyhow even initialization
itself is not slowed down: magic bitboard setup
stays around 175 msec on my slow 32bit Core Duo.
No functional change.
Marco Costalba