Daniel Jose reported that it was an elo gain in his engine:
http://www.talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=54290
STC: Hash=16
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 33067 W: 6670 L: 6571 D: 19826
LTC: Hash=64
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 41181 W: 7008 L: 6920 D: 27253
And another one to verify no regression with hash pressure:
STC: Hash=4
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-4.00,0.00]
Total: 25085 W: 5059 L: 4991 D: 15035
Verified that qsearch does not explode after this patch (recapture threshold).
Bench 7962287
Resolves#112
Objects that are only accessible at file-scope should be put in the anonymous namespace.
This is what the C++ standard recommends, rather than using static, which is really C-style and results in static linkage.
Stockfish already does this throughout the code. So let's weed out the few exceptions,
because... they have no reason to be exceptional.
No functional change.
Resolves#84
Believed to be a speed optimization as benched
on Windows with bench realtime affinity 0x1 deleting
highest and lowest runs:
Base Test
1549259 1608202
1538115 1583934
1543168 1556938
1536365 1554179
1533026 1582010
Signature remains unchanged and gives anywhere from 1-2% nps
boost in analysis depending on number of cores used.
No functional change.
Actually MultiCut is too different from current scheme.
Note that neither ProbCut is exactly what we do because
we try just a handful of captures instead of all moves,
nevertheless it seems more in line with what we do.
Suggested by Joona.
No functional change.
Actually race conditions do exist in an engine, just
think for a moment to TT concurrent access. Racy code
is not a problem per se, if the consequences are well
known and correctly handled.
In case of TT access we ensure that the TT move is validated
before to be tried, here we just retry the same move in less
that 1 case out of a million: this is totally harmless considering
that very probably the second time the move is tried we get
immediately a TT hit and search quickly returns.
So we simplify the code for no harm.
No fuctional change (in single thread case)
When we have a fail-high of a quiet move, store it in
a Followupmoves table indexed by the previous move of
the same color (instead of immediate previous move as
is in countermoves case).
Then use this table for quiet moves ordering in the same
way we are already doing with countermoves.
These followup moves will be tried just after countermoves
and before remaining quiet moves.
Passed both short TC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 10350 W: 1998 L: 1866 D: 6486
And long TC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,6.00]
Total: 14066 W: 2303 L: 2137 D: 9626
bench: 7205153
SMP case is very tricky and raises an assert in stage_moves():
assert(stage == KILLERS_S1 || stage == QUIETS_1_S1 || stage == QUIETS_2_S1)
So rewrite the code to just return moves[] when we are sure
we are in quiet moves stages.
Also rename stage_moves to quiet_moves to reflect that.
No functional change (but needs testing in SMP case)
Use MovePicker moves[] to access already tried
quiet moves. A bit of care shall be taken
to avoid calling stage_moves() when we are still
at ttMove stage, because moves are yet to be
generated. Actually our staging move generation
makes this code a bit more tricky than what I'd
like, but removing an ausiliary redundant
array like quietsSearched[] is a good thing.
Idea by DiscoCheck
bench: 9355734
This reverts commit 800410eef1 and instead increases
stack size.
I went through the old emails with Daylen that reported the
crash issue on Mac OS X and was fixed by 0049d3f337.
It was reported default stack size for a thread in Mac OS X is 8
megabytes while the patch that we are reverting allows to reduce
stack size at max of about 217KB, so the reason for the crash was
only marginal in MAX_MOVES value. On those emails Daylen also
hinted how to increase stack size for Mac OS X to 16MB.
So prefer to increase stack size to 16MB instad of re-inventing
the wheel and do our home grown stack as we did with the patch
that we are now reverting (it will remain anyhow in git history
for documentation purposes).
No functional change.
This greately reduces stack usage and is a
prerequisite for next patch.
Verified with 40K games both in single and SMP
case that there are no regressions.
No functional change.
Now that we use pre-increment on enums, it
make sense, for code style uniformity, to
swith to pre-increment also for native types,
although there is no speed difference.
No functional change.
A big simplification and removing of useless code.
Finished at 50% both at short TC (with SPRT) than
at long TC at fixed number of games:
ELO: -0.14 +-3.4 (95%) LOS: 46.8%
Total: 15206 W: 2836 L: 2842 D: 9528
bench: 5059948
Most of the time we cut-off earlier, at captures, so this
results in useless work.
There is a small functionality change becuase 'ss' can change
from MovePicker c'tor to when killers are tried due, for
instance, to singular search.
bench: 4603795
Very good at long 60"+0.05 TC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94)
Total: 5954 W: 1151 L: 1016 D: 3787
[edit: slightly changed form original patch to avoid useless loop
across killers when killer is MOVE_NONE]
bench: 4327405
Don't update refutation table in case of
previous move is MOVE_NULL or MOVE_NONE
and don't try refutation if is already
a killer move.
Pass both short TC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94)
Total: 4310 W: 953 L: 869 D: 2488
And long one
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94)
Total: 6707 W: 1254 L: 1184 D: 4269
bench: 4785954
Rename to insertion_sort so to avoid confusion
with std::sort, also move it to movepicker.cpp
and use the bit slower std::stable_sort in
search.cpp where it is used in not performance
critical paths.
No functional change.
Surprisingly this rare case was not considered
when scoring a capture.
Also take in account that in the promotion case
we gain a new piece (typically a queen) but we
lose the promoting pawn.
These small issues were present since Glaurung times!
Found while browsing DiscoCheck sources
bench: 5400063
