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>
Generate captures of checking piece and blocking
evasions in one go.
Also reduce of one indentation level early returning
when we have a double check.
Verified with perft no functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Don't seem to help, perhaps because we
return an approximate SEE score instead of the
real negative score so that we have some bad capture
or evasion sub-optimal ordering that compensates
the speed up.
Anyhow after 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +240 =514 -245 -2 ELO
So almost no harm to remove and make the code simpler.
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>
Because we only generate legal moves we can assume
a king cannot be recaptured, so we can safely return
immediately with the captured piece score. If the move
turns out to be illegal it will be pruned anyhow,
independently from SEE value. This gives a good speed up
especially now that we SEE-test all the evasions that
are always legal and very often are king moves.
Another optimization catches almost 15% of cases, unfortunatly
we have already calculated the very expensive attacks, so
benefits are not so big anyway.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This patch cuts 30% of SEE calculations, as a drawback
a returned negative value is no more always correct if
a shortcut is found.
This could impact move order when based on negative see
score as example bad captures and evasions.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Check generation is used only in qsearch and
only at Depth(0), castling moves that give check
are very rare overall and even almost not exsistent
at Depth(0).
So retire this almost never used code that adds
a small but consistent slow down in the normal path.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Because discovery checks are very rare it is better to handle
them all in one go and strip from usual check generation
function.
Also rewrite direct checks generation to use piece lists instead
of pop_1st_bit()
On perft test we have a +6% of speed up and is verified we
generate the same moves, although in a different order.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Patch from Joona with extension to benchmark and inclusion
of Depth(0) moves generation by me.
Note that to test also qsearch and in particulary checks
generations a change in the end condition is needed.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Verified against tuning branch.
After 100 games at 1+0 on Joona QUAD
Mod - Orig: 527.5 - 471.5 (+20 elo)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Give a bonus for each kind of attacked piece. Bonus
value is based on the type of attacked piece and the
type of attacking one.
Penalize pieces attacked by enemy pawns, also in
this case penality value depends on the type of
attacked piece.
This patch oboletes as redundant the increased mobility
count of the attcked squares that is then removed.
After 956 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +262 =462 -232 51.57% 493.0/956 +11 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Small code cleanup and a bit faster too.
The only functional change is that in extension
in pv node we extend promotions and not only captures
when condition met.
This is practically an undetectable change and has
no impact on strenght.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Even if SEE is negative there is always a good possibility
that TT move is a cut move anyway. For instance a lot of
BXN exchanges that have negative SEE can very easily be
good exchanges.
A nice side effect is a bit reduced frequency of
see_sign() calls.
After 643 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +174 =327 -142 52.49% 337.5/643 +17 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>
Only in less then 2% of cases we have a new sp->bestValue,
so check before to lock and save a costly locking
most of the times.
Patch suggested by Joona.
No functional search.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Use futility pruning also in split points.
Do not use history pruning in split points when
getting mated.
After 1000 games on Joona QUAD
Orig - Mod: 496 - 504
Added an optimization to avoid a costly lock in the
very common case that sp->futilityValue <= sp->bestValue.
A test on a dual CPU shows only 114 hits on 23196 events,
so avoid a lock in all the other cases.
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>
If after the first tried 2 + int(depth) moves we still
have no any move that takes us out of a mate then do
not prune the following move, it is more important to
escape mate then speed up search.
This fixes an odd behaviour regarding mates, as example
the following diagram is a mate in 4, not in 3 as bogusly
reported before this patch.
1B2n3/8/2R5/5p2/3kp1n1/4p3/B3K3/8 w - - bm #4;
The performance impact should be minimal, the increment
in searched nodes is less then 0.1 %%
Idea and patch by Joona
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +193 =604 -202 -3 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Marco's new code for evaluating two unstoppable passed pawns where
one pawn promotes a single ply before the other tried to detect
cases where the pawn that promotes first could immediately capture
the pawn that promotes a ply later, but didn't work in cases where
the two pawns are on the same file. An example of this is the
following position:
8/8/3K4/2P5/2p5/3k4/8/8 w - -
With the new code, such positions are handled correctly.
In this case we call evaluate() being in check and this
is not allowed.
Bug found testing with reduced PLY_MAX value as suggested
by Miguel A. Ballicora on talkchess.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Add a rule about the situation when one side queens exactly
one ply before the other. To avoid difficult (but luckly rare)
cases we only handle the case of free paths to queen for
both sides.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Fix a condition for x-ray attack of a queen or
a rook behind a pawn of us. Previous condition does
not check if the enemy slider behind our pawn is
really attacking the pawn.
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>
We want piece list to be terminated with SQ_NONE.
This happens with all the pieces but the pawns that
being 8 make the inner loop exit just before writing
the SQ_NONE value at the tail of the list.
This bug was hidden because currently we don't use
piece list to scan pawns, but this will change in the
future and in any case an initialization should be done
correctly for the whole array to avoid subtle bugs in
the future.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
This allow to resolve a lot of addresses at compile time
instead of an indirect access at runtime.
Speed up on pgo compile is of 1.3%
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It is not equivalent because the check for the
50 moves rule get badly affected.
// Draw by the 50 moves rule?
if (st->rule50 > 100 || (st->rule50 == 100 && !is_check()))
return true;
So we _really_ need two counters.
Thanks to Joona and Tord to be patience with a silly guy ;-)
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In case we reach ply == PLY_MAX we exit the function
writing
pv[PLY_MAX] = MOVE_NONE;
And because SearchStack is defined as:
struct SearchStack {
Move pv[PLY_MAX];
Move currentMove;
.....
We end up with the unwanted assignment
SearchStack.currentMove = MOVE_NONE;
Fortunatly this is harmless because currentMove is not used where
extarct_pv() is called. But neverthless this is a bug that
needs to be fixed.
Thanks to Uri Blass for spotting out this.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Null moves can artificially create a repetition
draw where instead there is no one.
So use a second counter to reset history after
a null move.
Idea from Joona.
After 999 games at 1+0
Mod vs Orig +238 =553 -208 51.50% 514.5/999 +10 ELO
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
When pondering InfiniteSearch == false but myTime == 0 so that
NodesBetweenPolls = 1000 instead of the standard.
The patch fixes the bug and is more robust because checks
directly myTime for a non-zero value, without relying on
an indirect test (InfiniteSearch in this case).
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
Instead of checking the time every 100 nodes in the last second,
and every 1000 nodes in the last five seconds, Stockfish now checks
every 1000 nodes in the last second and every 5000 nodes in the last
five seconds. This was tested in 1036 games at a time control of
40 moves/10 seconds, and no losses on time occured.
Also fixed a bug pointed out by Marco: In infinite mode, myTime
is actually 0, but of course we still don't want to check the time
more frequently than the standard once per 30000 nodes in this
case.
In RootMoveList c'tor we allocate a search stack and then
call directly qsearch.
There is called init_node() that clears all the fields of the search
stack array that refers to current ply but not the the killer moves.
The killer moves cleared correspond to ply+2.
In id_loop() this is not a problem because killer moves of
corresponding ply are cleared anyway few instructions later,
but in RootMoveList c'tor we leave them uninitialized.
This patch fixes this very old bug. It comes direclty
from Glaurung age.
Bug spotted by Valgrind.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
In particular don't use an array of StateInfo, this
avoids a possible overflow and is in any case redundant.
Also pass as argument the pv[] array size to avoid a second
possible overflow on this one.
Fix suggested by Joona.
No functional change.
Signed-off-by: Marco Costalba <mcostalba@gmail.com>
It turned out that we used do_move_bb to update the king and rook
bitboards when making and unmaking castling moves, which obviously
doesn't work in Chess960, where the source and destination squares
for the king or rook could be identical.
No functional change in normal chess.
