Actually after last patch it happens that delta
starts always with the fixed value of 16.
So further remove useless code.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It seems that we just need to look at previous score to
compute aspiration window size.
After 5350 games:
Mod vs Orig 800 - 803 - 3647 ELO +0 (+- 5.2)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Diretcly use the underlying std::vector<Move> and the
STL algorithms. Also a bit of cleanup while there.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is ok to redirect st pointer to startState, but the latter
should be updated with the content pointed by the st of the
original position. The bug is hidden when startState and *st
are the same as is the case of searching from start position,
but as soon as moves are made (as is the case when splitting)
the bug leads to a crash.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
The Position object used by UI thread is a local variable in
uci_loop(), so after receiving "quit" command the function
returns and the position is freed from the stack.
This should not be a problem becuase in start_thinking() we copy
the position to RootPosition that is the one used by main search
thread. Unfortunatly we blindly copy also StateInfo pointer that
still points to the startState struct inside UI position. So the
pointer becomes stale as soon as UI thread leaves uci_loop() and
because this happens while main search thread is still recovering
after the 'stop' signal we have a crash.
The fix is to update the pointer to the correct startState after
the copy.
Found with Valgrind.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Comments should be informative but not pedantic / obvious.
The only exception is the function description where we
indulge a bit on the "chatty" side, but has always been like
this since Glaurung times, so we continue with this tradition.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Tested togheter with previous patch; shows no regression and
is a semplification.
After 5817 games:
Mod vs Orig 939 - 892 - 3986 ELO +2 (+- 5.1)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Triggered by a comment of Eelco on talkchess. Also
a bit of cleanup while there.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Consider negative captures as good if
still enough to reach beta.
After 7502 games:
Mod vs Orig 1225 - 1158 - 5119 ELO +3 (+- 4.5)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
A cast rarely is the right solution. In this case was enough
to redifine 3 variables with type size_t instead of int
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It seems we don't have any added value. Note that the
moves that were used to be extended are still flagged
as dangerous so to avoid at least pruning them.
After 9555 games
Mod vs Orig 1562 - 1540 - 6453 ELO +0 (+- 4)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
As Heinz says:
"Function empty() should have a constant run-time even
on lousy compilers and you spare the not.
The change is even measurable: + 100-150 nodes/sec. Wow:-)"
Patch from Heinz van Saanen
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is more idiomatic for a functor (a function object) as are
the endgames.
Suggested by Rein Halbersma.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
A pinned piece cannot move and so does not play any role
in SAN disambiguation.
Reported by Steven Edwards.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It was never clear to me why we needed this trick, and now
that we rely only on C++ std::getline() and std::cout for
input / output it is even more a mistery what this code does.
So disable it and wait to see if someone screams ;-)
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Detach from the UI thread the input arguments used by
the search threads so that the UI thread is able to receive
and process any command sent by the GUI while other threads
keep searching.
With this patch there is no more need to block the UI
thread after a "stop", so it is a more reliable and
robust solution than the previous patch.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Unfortunatly xboard sends immediately the new position to
search after sending "stop" when we have a ponder miss.
Becuase main thread position is not copied but is referenced
directly from root position and the latter is modified by
the "position.." UCI command we end up with the working position
that changes under our feet while the search is still recovering
after the "stop" and this causes a crash.
This happens only with the (broken) xboard, native UCI does not
have this problem.
Reported by otello1984
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Fixes an hang when playing with ponder ON. Perhaps there is still
a very small race but now it seems engine does not hang anymore.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Move global search-related variables under "Search" namespace.
As a side effect we can move uci_async_command() and
wait_for_stop_or_ponderhit() away from search.cpp
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use the starting thread to wait for GUI input and instead use
the other threads to search. The consequence is that now think()
is alwasy started on a differnt thread than the caller that
returns immediately waiting for input. This reformat greatly
simplifies the code and is more in line with the common way
to implement this feature.
As a side effect now we don't need anymore Makefile tricks
with sleep() to allow profile builds.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
If we are pondering we will stop the search only when
GUI sends "ponderhit" or "stop" commands or when we reach
maximum depth. In all the other cases we continue to search
so there is no need to verify for available time.
Also better clarify why wait_for_stop_or_ponderhit() before
to exit in some cases.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In case there is only 1 legal move we will stop the
search at depth 10 anyway because the exclusion search
probe will fail low.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In the "easy move" paradigm we verify if the best move has
ever changed over a good number of iterations and if the
biggest part of the searched nodes are consumed on it.
This is a kind of hacky ad indirect heuristic to deduce
if one move is much better than others.
Rewrite the early stop condition to verify directly if one
move is much better than others performing an exclusion
search.
Idea to use exclusion search for time management if form Critter.
After 12245 games at 30"+0.1
Mod vs Orig 1776 - 1775 - 8694 ELO +0 (+-3.4)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Tuned with CLOP against a pool of 3 engines. Result
verified with a direct match:
After 11720 games at 10"+0.1
Mod vs Orig 1922 - 1832 - 7966 ELO +2 (+-3.6)
So no change in self match but if CLOP is right it should
be a bit better against an engine pool.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
The value returned by root search it is actually
our best value, so rename the variable to reflect this.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Instead of binding link time optimization to the choice of
popcount support, do the right thing and add -flto option
when gcc 4.5 or later is detected.
Although it should be supported also under mingw, it happens
that it doesn't, at least on my 4.6.1 due to some known bugs.
Thanks to Mike for helping me with this patch.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Remove the bonus for no *friendly* pieces in the pawn's path and
reduce a bit the bonus based on kings proximity.
This patch is part of to the ongoing effort to remove form evaluation
all the terms that do not add value.
After 16284 games:
Mod vs Orig 2728 - 2651 - 10911 ELO +1 (+- 3.1)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
After a "stop" due to a ponder miss Xboard sends
immediately the new position to search, without
waiting for engine to effectively stop the search.
It is not clear if this is a GUI bug (as I suspect)
or allowed behaviour, but because it won't be fixed
anyway workaround this issue making listener thread
to switch to in-sync mode as soon as a "stop" command
is received.
Thanks to Mike Whiteley for reporting this.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
If GUI sends stop while we are waiting for
a command do not reply with a silly:
Unknown command: stop
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Oliver reports profile builds error with new gcc 4.6, he says:
"We need to add -lgov with profile-generate AND profile-use.
So it has to be added to the second stage of building too.
The problem occurred first with the introduction of gcc4.6 and
I think this is because the previous version did find the gcov
library automatically. gcc4.6 needs more precise options and
does less guesses. I have seen it in debian, Ubuntu and also with
mingw on Windows. And all use gcc4.6."
This patch fixes the issue.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
After async I/O patches 'bench' changed behaviour and now waits for
input at the end of the test run. This is due to listener thread stay
blocked on std::getline() even after test run is finished, as soon as
we feed something the thread unblocks and then quickly exits.
This is not a big problem, but has the bad side effect of breaking
profile builds that hang forever at the end of the test run.
The tricky workaround is to create a pipe that connects to stockfish
input and then, when test run is finished, breaking the pipe: this
makes std::getline() immediately return.
So this patch adds a 'sleep 10' piped into 'stockfish bench' test run
command. After 10 seconds sleep ends, the pipe breaks and 'bench'
finishes as usual.
Thanks to Oliver Korff for reporting the issue, and to Mike Whiteley
for having co-authored this solution.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use do_uci_async_cmd() instead of process input commands
directly and clarify that what we are waiting for is
something that is able to raise StopRequest flag.
Also fix some stale comments in do_uci_async_cmd(). Here
we need to reset Limits.ponder only upon receiving "ponderhit".
In the case of "quit" or "stop" resetting Limits.ponder has no
effect because the search is going to be stopped anyway.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
The timer will be fired asynchronously to handle
time management flags, while other threads are
searching.
This implementation uses a thread waiting on a
timed condition variable instead of real timers.
This approach allow to reduce platform dependant
code to a minimum and also is the most portable given
that timers libraries are very different among platforms
and also the best ones are not compatible with olds
Windows.
Also retire the now unused polling code.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
With our new listener thread we don't need anymore
this ugly and platform dependent code.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Instead of polling for input use a dedicated listener
thread to read commands from the GUI independently
from other threads.
To do this properly we have to delegate to the listener
all the reading from the GUI: while searching but also
while waiting for a command, like in std::getline().
So we have two possible behaviours: in-sync mode, in which
the thread mimics std::getline() and the caller blocks until
something is read from GUI, and async mode where the listener
continuously reads and processes GUI commands while other
threads are searching.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
