It seems gain is practically unuseful, so remove.
After 13554 games:
Mod vs Orig 2252 - 2319 - 8983 ELO -1 (+- 3.4)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Functional change due only to moves reorder. Anyhow after
5242 games at 15"+0.1 TC verified we have no regression.
Mod vs Orig 994 - 958 - 3290 +2 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Namely we use only two types of depth in TT:
DEPTH_QS_CHECKS or DEPTH_QS_NO_CHECKS.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
When we store this value in TT we cut this to 9 bits,
so we need a smaller variable otherwise comparisons
like:
replace->generation() == generation
Are always false if generation is bigger then the maximum
TT storable value.
This fixes a very nasty and difficult to spot bug (2 weeks for
regression hunting).
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Mostly suggested by Justin (UncombedCoconut), the 0ULL -> 0 conversion
is mine.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use the tail of moves[] array to store bad captures.
No functional change but some move reorder. Verified with old perft.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Tested with Orig set at f5ef5632f so to evaluate
direct gain against 1.8
After 3239 games at 10"+0.1
Mod vs Orig +701 =1906 -632 +7 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Also renamed history access value in something more
in line with the meaning.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It seems there is absolutely no difference in using gains.
After 7025 games at 5"+0
Mod vs Orig +1903 =3236 -1886 (+1 ELO)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Many killers moves, around 40%, are not legal, so
skip earlier in this case.
Some Movepicker c'tor cleanup while there.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This is the world's fussiest compiler with +w1
Warnings reported by Richard Lloyd.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Consider sligtly negative captures as good if at low
depth and far from beta.
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +169 =694 -136 +11 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Gain value is multiplied by 16 to be of comparable magnitudo
of negative history, on average.
This patch shows very good results in tactical tests, but
started very bad in real games, so I have run two test matches.
After 896 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +187 =525 -184 +1 ELO
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +223 =590 -186 +13 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
We can do this only when needed, if we get a cut-off
before we skip sorting entirely. This reduces sorting
time of about 20%.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Because H.move_ordering_score() can return negative values
some negative see moves could be searched before non-negative
see moves with negative history.
This patch restores proper ordering.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Now that history can go negative and is almost alwyas
non zero we have no more reasons to use also psqt term.
After 994 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +204 =597 -193 +4 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Under some rare cases we can have a search tree explosion
due to a perpetual check or to a very long non-capture TT
sequence.
This avoids the tree explosion not following TT moves that
are not captures or promotions when we are below the
'generate checks' depth.
Idea suggested by Richard Vida.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Avoid to take the lock two times in a tight sequence, the first
in get_next_move() and the second to update sp->moves.
Do all with one lock and so retire the now useless locked version
of get_next_move().
Also fix some theorical race due to comparison sp->bestValue < sp->beta
is done out of lock protection. Finally fix another (harmless but time
waster) race that coudl occur because thread_should_stop() is also
called outside of lock protection.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use the same scoring system used for evasions. Small if any
increase, but should be in at least for completeness.
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +208 =601 -190 +6 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is not useful becasue it is safe to call
get_next_move() multiple times when phase == PH_STOP
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Increases performance because now we use one integer
for both midgame and endgame scores.
Unfortunatly the latest patches seem to have reduced a bit
the speed so at the end we are more or less at the same
performance level of the beginning. But this patch series
introduced also some code cleanup so it is the main reason
we commit anyway.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Instead of MgPieceSquareTable[16][64] and EgPieceSquareTable[16][64]
This allows to fetch mg and eg values from adjacent words in memory.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This allow us to avoid the generation of the
evasion moves if we already have a TT move, and
in case we have a cut-off we skip evasion generation
altoghter.
Node count is changed because now we try TT move _before_
to generate evasions. The search on the TT move alters the
piece lists so that when we come back to generate evasions
we build the move list with a diferent order and this alters
the node count.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is now no more needed to know dc candidates
inside MovePicker, so avoid calculating there.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Big cleanup and semplification of pawns evasions that
now are pseudo-legal as the remaining moves. This
allow us to remove a lot of tricky code.
Verified against perft: no functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This allow a big semplification in move generation
that will be committed with the next patch. And makes
handling of evasions similar to the other type of moves.
This patch plus the next seem to improve also on
the performance side because after 640 games to
verify there are no hidden regressions we are at +9 ELO
Verified with perft no functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Always try ttMove as first. Then try good captures ordered
by MVV/LVA, then non-captures if destination square is not
under attack, ordered by history value, and at the end
bad-captures and non-captures with a negative SEE. This
last group is ordered by the SEE score.
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +254 =546 -199 +19 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
When the move list is very small, like captures normally
are, it is faster to pick the best move with a linear
scan, one per cycle.
This has the added advantage that the picked capture move is
very possibly a cut-off move, so that other searches are
avoided. For non-captures it is still faster to sort in
advance.
Because scan-and-pick alghortim is not stable, node count
has changed.
After 885 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +196 =510 -179 50.96% 451.0/885
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is stable and it is also a bit faster then std::sort()
on the tipical small move lists that we need to handle.
Verified to have same functionality of std::stable_sort()
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +240 =534 -225 50.75% 507.0/999 +5 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Unfortunatly std::stable_sort() implementation in gcc is
horrendously slow. We have a big performance regression on
Linux systems (-20% !)
So revert the commit and wait to fix the issue in a different
way, perhaps with an our home grown sorting, that should be
comparable in speed with std::sort()
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Standard does not mandate std::sort() to be stable, so we
can have, and actually do have different node count on
different platforms.
So use the platform independent std::stable_sort() and gain
same functionality on any platform (Windows, Unix, Mac OS)
and with any compiler (MSVC, gcc or Intel C++).
This sort is teoretically slower, but profiling shows only a very
minimal drop in performance, probably due to the fact that
the set to sort is very small, mainly only captures and with
less frequency non-captures, anyhow we are talking of 30-40 moves
in the worst average case. Sorting alghortims are build to work on
thousands or even milions of elements. With such small sets
performance difference seems not noticable.
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +234 =523 -242 -3 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is more clear that only in that case the move number is
correct, otherwise is only a partial quantity: the number of
moves of that phase.
In case of PH_EVASIONS instead we have only one phase.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>