In November 2019, as a result of the simplification of rank-based outposts by 37698b0,
separate bonuses were introduced for outposts that are currently occupied and outposts
that are reachable on the next move. However, the values of these two bonuses are
quite similar, and they have remained that way for three months of development.
It appears that we can safely retire the separate ReachableOutpost parameter and
use the same Outpost bonus in both cases, restoring the basic principles of Stockfish
outpost evaluation to their pre-November state, while also reducing
the size of the parameter space.
STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) {-1.50,0.50}
Total: 47680 W: 9213 L: 9092 D: 29375
Ptnml(0-2): 776, 5573, 11071, 5594, 826
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5e51e33190a0a02810d09802
LTC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) {-1.50,0.50}
Total: 14690 W: 1960 L: 1854 D: 10876
Ptnml(0-2): 93, 1381, 4317, 1435, 119
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5e52197990a0a02810d0980f
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2559
Bench: 4697493
This patch greatly increases the endgame penalty for having a trapped rook.
Idea was a result of witnessing Stockfish losing some games at CCCC exchanging
pieces in the position with a trapped rook which directly lead to a lost endgame.
This patch should partially fix such behavior making this penalty high even in
deep endgames.
Passed STC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5e279d7cc3b97aa0d75bc1c4
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) {-1.00,3.00}
Total: 8528 W: 1706 L: 1588 D: 5234
Ptnml(0-2): 133, 957, 1985, 1024, 159
Passed LTC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5e27aee4c3b97aa0d75bc1e1
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) {0.00,2.00}
Total: 88713 W: 11520 L: 11130 D: 66063
Ptnml(0-2): 646, 8170, 26342, 8492, 676
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2510
Bench: 4964462
----------------------
Comment by Malcolm Campbell:
Congrats! I think this might be a common pattern - scores that seem to mainly apply
to the midgame are often better with a similar (or at least fairly big) endgame value
as well. Maybe there are others eval parameters we can tweak like this...
This patch excludes blockers for king from mobility area. It was tried a couple
of times by now but now it passed. Performance is not enormously good but this
patch makes a lot of sence - blockers for king can't really move until king moves
(in most cases) so logic behind it is the same as behind excluding king square
from mobility area.
STC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dec388651219d7befdc76be
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 6155 W: 1428 L: 1300 D: 3427
LTC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dec4a3151219d7befdc76d3
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 120800 W: 19636 L: 19134 D: 82030
Bench: 5173081
this patch extends bench to print static evaluations.
./stockfish bench 16 1 1 filename eval
will now print the evaluations for all fens in the file.
This complements the various 'go' flavors for bench and might be useful for debugging and/or tuning.
No functional change.
In a recent commit, "Introduce king flank defenders," a term was introduced
by Michael Chaly (@Vizvezdenec) to reduce king danger based on king defenders,
i.e., friendly attacks on our King Flank and Camp. This is a powerful idea
and broadly applicable to all of our pieces.
An earlier, but narrower, version of a similar idea was already coded into
king danger, with a term reducing king danger simply if we had a bishop and
king attacking the same square -- there is also a similar term for knights,
but roughly three times larger. I had attempted to tweak this term's coefficient
fairly recently, in a series of tests in early September which increased this
coefficient. All failed STC with significantly negative scores.
Now that the king flank defenders term has been introduced, it appears that
the bishop-defense term can be simplified away without compensation or
significant Elo loss.
Where do we go from here? This PR is a natural follow-up to "Introduce king
flank defenders," which proposed simplification with existing and overlapping
terms, such as this one. That PR also mentioned that the coefficient it
introduced appeared arbitrary, so perhaps this PR can facilitate a tweak to
increase king flank defenders' coefficient.
Additionally, this pull request is extremely similar to https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/1821,
which was (coincidentally) merged a year ago, to the day (November 23, 2018).
That patch also simplified away a linear king danger tropism term, which was
soon after replaced with a quadratic term by @Vizvezdenec (which would not have
passed without the simplification). @Vizvezdenec, again by coincidence, has
recently been trying to implement a quadratic term, this time for defenders
rather than attackers. This history of this evaluation code suggests that
this simplification might be enough to help a patch for quadratic king-flank
defenders pass.
Bench: 4959670
STC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 22209 W: 4920 L: 4800 D: 12489
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dd444d914339111b9b6bed7
LTC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 152107 W: 24658 L: 24743 D: 102706
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dd4be31f531e81cf278ea9d
Interesting discussion on Github about this pull request:
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2424
---
This pull request was opened less than one week before the holiday of
Thanksgiving here in the United States. In keeping with the holiday
tradition of expressing gratitude, I would like to thank our generous
CPU donors, talented forum contributors, innovative developers, speedy
fishtest approvers, and especially our hardworking server maintainers
(@ppigazzini and @tomtor). Thank you all for a year of great Stockfish
progress!
This patch implements what we have been trying for quite some time -
dependance of kingdanger on balance of attackers and defenders of king
flank, to avoid overestimate attacking power if the opponent has enough
defenders of king position. We already have some form of it in bishop
and knight defenders - this is further work in this direction.
What to do based on this?
1) constant 4 is arbitrary, maybe it is not optimal
2) maybe we can use quadratic formula as in kingflankattack
3) simplification into alrealy existing terms is always a possibility :)
4) overall kingdanger tuning always can be done.
passed STC:
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dcf40560ebc590256325f30
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 26298 W: 5819 L: 5632 D: 14847
passed LTC:
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dcfa5760ebc590256326464
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 30600 W: 5042 L: 4784 D: 20774
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2415
Bench: 4496847
Introduce OutpostRank[RANK_NB] which contains a bonus according to
the rank of the outpost. We use it for the primary Outpost bonus.
The values are based on the trends of the SPSA tuning run with some
manual tweaks.
Passed STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 27454 W: 6059 L: 5869 D: 15526
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dcadba20ebc590256922f09
Passed LTC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 57950 W: 9443 L: 9112 D: 39395
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5dcaea880ebc5902569230bc
Bench: 4778405
----------------------------
The inspiration for this patch came from Stefan Geschwentner's attempt
of modifying BishopPawns into a rank-based penalty. Michael Stembera
suggested that maybe the S(0, 0) ranks (3rd, 7th and also maybe 8th)
can still be tuned. This would expand our definition of Outpost and
OutpostRanks would be removed altogether. Special thanks to Mark Tenzer
for all the help and excellent suggestions.
As Stockfish developers, we aim to make our code as legible and as close
to simple English as possible. However, one of the more notable exceptions
to this rule concerns operations between Squares and Bitboards.
Prior to this pull request, AND, OR, and XOR were only defined when the
Bitboard was the first operand, and the Square the second. For example,
for a Bitboard b and Square s, "b & s" would be valid but "s & b" would not.
This conflicts with natural reasoning about logical operators, both
mathematically and intuitively, which says that logical operators should
commute.
More dangerously, however, both Square and Bitboard are defined as integers
"under the hood." As a result, code like "s & b" would still compile and give
reasonable bench values. This trap occasionally ensnares even experienced
Stockfish developers, but it is especially dangerous for new developers not
aware of this peculiarity. Because there is no compilation or runtime error,
and a reasonable bench, only a close review by approvers can spot this error
when a test has been submitted--and many times, these bugs have slipped past
review. This is by far the most common logical error on Fishtest, and has
wasted uncountable STC games over the years.
However, it can be fixed by adding three non-functional lines of code. In this
patch, we define the operators when the operands are provided in the opposite
order, i.e., we make AND, OR, and XOR commutative for Bitboards and Squares.
Because these are inline methods and implemented identically, the executable
does not change at all.
This patch has the small side-effect of requiring Squares to be explicitly
cast to integers before AND, OR, or XOR with integers. This is only performed
twice in Stockfish's source code, and again does not change the executable at
all (since Square is an enum defined as an integer anyway).
For demonstration purposes, this pull request also inverts the order of one AND
and one OR, to show that neither the bench nor the executable change. (This
change can be removed before merging, if preferred.)
I hope that this pull request significantly lowers the barrier-of-entry for new
developer to join the Stockfish project. I also hope that this change will improve
our efficiency in using our generous CPU donors' machines, since it will remove
one of the most common causes of buggy tests.
Following helpful review and comments by Michael Stembera (@mstembera), we add
a further clean-up by implementing OR for two Squares, to anticipate additional
traps developers may encounter and handle them cleanly.
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2387
No functional change.
Simplify the king ring initialization and make it more regular, by just
moving the king square off the edges and using PseudoAttacks by king from
this new square.
There is a small functional difference from the previous master, as the
old master excludes the original ksq square while this patch always includes
the nine squares block (after moving the king from the edges). Additionally,
master does not adjust the kingRing down if we are on relative rank 8,
while this patch treats all of the edges the same.
STC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 13263 W: 2968 L: 2830 D: 7465
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5db872830ebc5902d1f388aa
LTC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 72996 W: 11819 L: 11780 D: 49397
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5db899c20ebc5902d1f38b5e
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2384
Bench: 4959244
- Cleanups by Alain
- Group king attacks and king defenses
- Signature of futility_move_count()
- Use is_discovery_check_on_king()
- Simplify backward definition
- Use static asserts in move generator
- Factor a statement in move generator
No functional change
Previously, we used various control statements and ternary operators to divide
Outpost into four bonuses, based on whether the outpost was for a knight or
bishop, and whether it was currently an Outpost or merely a potential ("reachable")
one in the future. Bishop outposts, however, have traditionally been worth far
less Elo in testing. An attempt to remove them altogether passed STC, but failed LTC.
Here we include a narrower simplification, removing the reachable Outpost bonus
for bishops. This bonus was always suspect, given that its current implementation
conflicts directly with BishopPawns. BishopPawns penalizes our bishops based on the
number of friendly pawns on the same color of square, but by definition, Outposts
must be pawn-protected! This PR helps to alleviate this conceptual contradiction
without loss of Elo and with slightly simpler code.
On a code level, this allows us to simplify a ternary operator into the previous
"if" block and distribute a multiplication into an existing constant Score. On a
conceptual level, we retire one of the four traditional Outpost bonuses.
STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 22277 W: 4882 L: 4762 D: 12633
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d9aeed60ebc5902b6cf9751
LTC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 51206 W: 8353 L: 8280 D: 34573
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d9af1940ebc5902b6cf9cd5
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2352
Bench: 3941591
Remove the RookOnPawn logic (for rook on rank 5 and above aligning with pawns
on same row or file) which was overlapping with a few other parameters.
Inspired by @31m059 interesting result hinting that a direct attack on pawns
instead of PseudoAttacks might work.
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d89a7c70ebc595091801b8d
After a few attempts by me and @31m059, and some long STC greens but red LTC,
as a proof of concept I first tried a local SPSA at VSTC trying to tune related
rook psqt rows, and mainly some rook related stuff in evaluate.cpp.
Result was STC green, but still red LTC,
Finally a 100M fishtest SPSA at LTC proved successful both at STC and LTC.
All this was possible with the awesome fishtest contributors.
At some point, I had 850 workers on the last test !
Run as a simplification
STC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d8d68f40ebc590f3beaf171
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 7399 W: 1693 L: 1543 D: 4163
LTC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d8d70270ebc590f3beaf63c
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 41617 W: 6981 L: 6894 D: 27742
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2329
bench: 4037914
This patch replaces the obscure expressions mapping files ABCDEFGH to ABCDDCBA
by explicite calls to an auxiliary function:
old: f = min(f, ~f)
new: f = map_to_queenside(f)
We used the Golbolt web site (https://godbolt.org) to check that the current
code for the auxiliary function is optimal.
STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 30292 W: 6756 L: 6651 D: 16885
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d8676720ebc5971531d6aa1
Achieved with a bit of help from Sopel97, snicolet and vondele, thanks everyone!
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2325
No functional change
Author: @nickpelling
We replace in the code the obscure expressions mapping files ABCDEFGH to ABCDDCBA
by an explicite call to an auxiliary function :
old: f = min(f, ~f)
new: f = map_to_queenside(f)
We used the Golbolt web site (https://godbolt.org) to find the optimal code
for the auxiliary function.
STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 30292 W: 6756 L: 6651 D: 16885
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d8676720ebc5971531d6aa1
No functional change
When scoring the connected pawns, replace the intricate ternary expressions
choosing the coefficient by a simpler addition of boolean conditions:
` value = Connected * (2 + phalanx - opposed) `
This is the map showing the old coefficients and the new ones:
```
phalanx and unopposed: 3x -> 3x
phalanx and opposed: 1.5x -> 2x
not phalanx and unopposed: 2x -> 2x
not phalanx and opposed: 1x -> 1x
```
STC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 11354 W: 2579 L: 2437 D: 6338
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d8151f00ebc5971531d244f
LTC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 41221 W: 7001 L: 6913 D: 27307
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d818f930ebc5971531d26d6
Bench: 3959889
blah
This patch decreases the endgame scale factor using the 50 moves counter.
Looking at some games with this patch, it seems to have two effects on
the playing style:
1) when no progress can be made in late endgames (for instance in fortresses
or opposite bishops endgames) the evaluation will be largely tamed down
towards a draw value.
2) more interestingly, there is also a small effect in the midgame play because
Stockfish will panic a little bit if there are more than four consecutive
shuffling moves with an advantage: the engine will try to move a pawn or to
exchange a piece to keep the advantage, so the follow-ups of the position
will be discovered earlier by the alpha-beta search.
passed STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.50,4.50]
Total: 23017 W: 5080 L: 4805 D: 13132
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d7e4aef0ebc59069c36fc74
passed LTC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 30746 W: 5171 L: 4911 D: 20664
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d7e513d0ebc59069c36ff26
Pull request: https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2304
Bench: 4272173
This patch finally introduces something that was tried for years: midgame score
dependance on complexity of position. More precisely, if the position is very
simplified and the complexity measure calculated in the initiative() function
is inferior to -50 by an amount d, then we add this value d to the midgame score.
One example of play of this patch will be (again!) 4 vs 3 etc same flank endgames
where sides have a lot of non-pawn material: 4 vs 3 draw mostly remains the same
draw even if we add a lot of equal material to both sides.
STC run was stopped after 200k games (and not converging):
LLR: -1.75 (-2.94,2.94) [0.50,4.50]
Total: 200319 W: 44197 L: 43310 D: 112812
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d7cfdb10ebc5902d386572c
passed LTC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 41051 W: 6858 L: 6570 D: 27623
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d7d14680ebc5902d3866196
This is the first and not really precise version, a lot of other stuff can be
tried on top of it (separate complexity for middlegame, some more terms, even
simple retuning of values).
Bench: 4248476
This patch greatly scales down complexity of endgames when the
following conditions are all true together:
- pawns are all on one flank
- stronger side king is not outflanking weaker side
- no passed pawns are present
This should improve stockfish evaluation of obvious draws 4 vs 3, 3 vs 2
and 2 vs 1 pawns in rook/queen/knight/bishop single flank endgames where
strong side can not make progress.
passed STC
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) [0.50,4.50]
Total: 15843 W: 3601 L: 3359 D: 8883
passed LTC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,3.50]
Total: 121275 W: 20107 L: 19597 D: 81571
Closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/2298
Bench: 3954190
==========================
How to continue from there?
a) This could be a powerful idea for refining some parts of the evaluation
function, a bit like when we try quadratics or other equations to emphasize
certain situations (xoto10).
b) Some other combinaison values for this bonus can be done further, or
overall retuning of weight and offset while keeping the formula simple.
This is another functional simplification to Stockfish passed pawn evaluation.
Stockfish evaluates some pawns which are not yet passed as "candidate" passed pawns, which are given half the bonus of fully passed ones. Prior to this commit, Stockfish considered a passed pawn to be a "candidate" if (a) it would not be a passed pawn if moved one square forward (the blocking square), or (b) there were other pawns (of either color) in front of it on the file. This latter condition used a fairly complicated method, forward_file_bb; here, rather than inspect the entire forward file, we simply re-use the blocking square. As a result, some pawns previously considered "candidates", but which are able to push forward, no longer have their bonus halved.
Simplification tests passed quickly at both STC and LTC. The results from both tests imply that this simplification is, most likely, additionally a small Elo gain, with a LTC likelihood of superiority of 87 percent.
STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 12908 W: 2909 L: 2770 D: 7229
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d2a1c880ebc5925cf0d9006
LTC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 20723 W: 3591 L: 3470 D: 13662
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5d2a21fd0ebc5925cf0d9118
Bench: 3377831
