If ttMove is doubly extended, we allow a depth growth of the remaining moves.
The idea is to get a more realistic score comparison, because of the depth
difference. We take some care to avoid this extension for high depths,
in order to avoid the cost, since the search result is supposed
to be more accurate in this case.
This pull request includes some small cleanups.
STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) <0.00,2.00>
Total: 60256 W: 16189 L: 15848 D: 28219
Ptnml(0-2): 182, 6546, 16330, 6889, 181
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/639109a1792a529ae8f27777
LTC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) <0.50,2.50>
Total: 106232 W: 28487 L: 28053 D: 49692
Ptnml(0-2): 46, 10224, 32145, 10652, 49
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/63914cba792a529ae8f282ee
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4271
Bench: 3622368
Add a constraint so that the dependency build only occurs when users
actually run build tasks.
This fixes a bug on some systems where gcc/g++ is not available.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4255
No functional change
fixes the lowerbound/upperbound output by avoiding
scores outside the alpha,beta bracket. Since SF search
uses fail-soft we can't simply take the returned value
as score.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4259
No functional change
Official release version of Stockfish 15.1
Bench: 3467381
---
Today, we have the pleasure to announce Stockfish 15.1.
As usual, downloads will be freely available at stockfishchess.org/download
*Elo gain and competition results*
With this release, version 5 of the NNUE neural net architecture has
been introduced, and the training data has been extended to include
Fischer random chess (FRC) positions. As a result, Elo gains are largest
for FRC, reaching up to 50 Elo for doubly randomized FRC[1] (DFRC).
More importantly, also for standard chess this release progressed and
will win two times more game pairs than it loses[2] against
Stockfish 15. Stockfish continues to win in a dominating way[3] all
chess engine tournaments, including the TCEC Superfinal, Cup, FRC, DFRC,
and Swiss as well as the CCC Bullet, Blitz, and Rapid events.
*New evaluation*
This release also introduces a new convention for the evaluation that
is reported by search. An evaluation of +1 is now no longer tied to the
value of one pawn, but to the likelihood of winning the game. With
a +1 evaluation, Stockfish has now a 50% chance of winning the game
against an equally strong opponent. This convention scales down
evaluations a bit compared to Stockfish 15 and allows for consistent
evaluations in the future.
*ChessBase settlement*
In this release period, the Stockfish team has successfully enforced
its GPL license against ChessBase. This has been an intense process that
included filing a lawsuit[4], a court hearing[5], and finally
negotiating a settlement[6] that established that ChessBase infringed on
the license by not distributing the Stockfish derivatives Fat Fritz 2
and Houdini 6 as free software, and that ensures ChessBase will respect
the Free Software principles in the future. This settlement has been
covered by major chess sites (see e.g. lichess.org[7] and chess.com[8]),
and we are proud that it has been hailed as a ‘historic violation
settlement[9]’ by the Software Freedom Conservancy.
*Thank you*
The Stockfish project builds on a thriving community of enthusiasts
(thanks everybody!) that contribute their expertise, time, and resources
to build a free and open-source chess engine that is robust, widely
available, and very strong. We invite our chess fans to join the
fishtest testing framework and programmers to contribute to the
project[10].
The Stockfish team
[1] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/638a6170d2b9c924c4c62cb4
[2] https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/638a4dd7d2b9c924c4c6297b
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockfish_(chess)#Competition_results
[4] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-chessbase/
[5] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/public-court-hearing-soon/
[6] https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2022/chessbase-stockfish-agreement/
[7] https://lichess.org/blog/Y3u1mRAAACIApBVn/settlement-reached-in-stockfish-v-chessbase
[8] https://www.chess.com/news/view/chessbase-stockfish-reach-settlement
[9] https://sfconservancy.org/news/2022/nov/28/sfc-named-trusted-party-in-gpl-case/
[10] https://stockfishchess.org/get-involved/
If multiple threads have the same best move,
pick the thread with the largest contribution to the confidence vote.
This thread will later be used to display PV, so this patch is
about user-friendliness and/or least surprises, it non-functional for playing strenght.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4246
No functional change
fixes the lowerbound/upperbound output by taking the alpha,beta bracket
into account also if a bestThread is selected that is different from the master thread.
Instead of keeping track which bounds where used in the specific search,
in this version we simply store the quality (exact, upperbound,
lowerbound) of the score along with the actual score as information on
rootMove.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4239
No functional change
This updates the WDL model based on the LTC statistics (2M games).
Relatively small change, note that this also adjusts the NormalizeToPawnValue (now 361),
to keep win prob at 50% for 100cp.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4236
No functional change.
Github Actions allows us to use up to 20 workers.
This way we can launch multiple different checks
at the same time and optimize the overall time
the CI takes a bit.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4223
No functional change
For development versions of Stockfish, the version will now look like
dev-20221107-dca9a0533
indicating a development version, the date of the last commit,
and the git SHA of that commit. If git is not available,
the fallback is the date of compilation. Releases will continue to be
versioned as before.
Additionally, this PR extends the CI to create binary artifacts,
i.e. pushes to master will automatically build Stockfish and upload
the binaries to github.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4220
No functional change
Normalizes the internal value as reported by evaluate or search
to the UCI centipawn result used in output. This value is derived from
the win_rate_model() such that Stockfish outputs an advantage of
"100 centipawns" for a position if the engine has a 50% probability to win
from this position in selfplay at fishtest LTC time control.
The reason to introduce this normalization is that our evaluation is, since NNUE,
no longer related to the classical parameter PawnValueEg (=208). This leads to
the current evaluation changing quite a bit from release to release, for example,
the eval needed to have 50% win probability at fishtest LTC (in cp and internal Value):
June 2020 : 113cp (237)
June 2021 : 115cp (240)
April 2022 : 134cp (279)
July 2022 : 167cp (348)
With this patch, a 100cp advantage will have a fixed interpretation,
i.e. a 50% win chance. To keep this value steady, it will be needed to update the win_rate_model()
from time to time, based on fishtest data. This analysis can be performed with
a set of scripts currently available at https://github.com/vondele/WLD_model
fixes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/issues/4155
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4216
No functional change
Joint work by Ofek Shochat and Stéphane Nicolet.
passed STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) <0.00,2.00>
Total: 93288 W: 24996 L: 24601 D: 43691
Ptnml(0-2): 371, 10263, 24989, 10642, 379
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/63448f4f4bc7650f07541987
passed LTC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) <0.50,2.50>
Total: 84168 W: 22771 L: 22377 D: 39020
Ptnml(0-2): 47, 8181, 25234, 8575, 47
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/6345186d4bc7650f07542fbd
================
It seems there are two effects with this patch:
effect A :
If Stockfish is winning at root, we have optimism > 0 for all leaves in
the search tree where Stockfish is to move. There, if (psq - nnue) > 0
(ie if the advantage is more materialistic than positional), then the
product D = optimism * (psq - nnue) will be positive, nnueComplexity will
increase, and the eval will increase from SF point of view.
So the effect A is that if Stockfish is winning at root, she will slightly
favor in the search tree (in other words, search more) the positions where
she can convert her advantage via materialist means.
effect B :
If Stockfish is losing at root, we have optimism > 0 for all leaves in
the search tree where the opponent is to move. There, if (psq - nnue) < 0
(ie if the opponent advantage is more positional than materialistic), then
the product D = optimism * (psq-nnue) will be negative, nnueComplexity will
decrease, and the eval will decrease from the opponent point of view.
So the effect B is that Stockfish will slightly favor in the search tree
(search more) the branches where she can defend by slowly reducing the
opponent positional advantage.
=================
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4195
bench: 4673898