The previous asymmetry measure of the pawn structure only used to
consider the number of pawns on semi-opened files in the position.
With this patch we also increase the measure by the number of passed
pawns for both players.
Many thanks to the community for the nice feedback on the previous
version, with special mentions to Alain Savard and Marco Costalba
for clarity and speed suggestions.
STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 13146 W: 3038 L: 2840 D: 7268
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a91dd0c0ebc590297cc877e
LTC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 27776 W: 4771 L: 4536 D: 18469
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a91fdd50ebc590297cc879b
How to continue after this patch?
Stockfish will now evaluate more positions with passed pawns, so
tuning the passed pawns values may bring Elo. The patch has also
consequences on the initiative term, where we might want to give
different weights to passed pawns and semi-openfiles (idea by
Stefano Cardanobile).
Bench: 5302866
The previous asymmetry measure of the pawn structure only used to
consider the number of pawns on semi-opened files in the postions.
With this patch we also increase the measure by the number of passed
pawns for both players.
STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 13146 W: 3038 L: 2840 D: 7268
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a91dd0c0ebc590297cc877e
LTC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 27776 W: 4771 L: 4536 D: 18469
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5a91fdd50ebc590297cc879b
How to continue from there: Stockfish will now evaluate more positions
with passed pawns, so tuning the passed pawns values may bring Elo.
The patch also has consequences on the initiative term.
Bench: 5302866
This is one of the most difficult to understand but also
most important and speed critical functions of SF.
This patch rewrites some part of it to hopefully
make it clearer and drop some redundant variables
in the process.
Same speed than master (or even a bit more).
Thanks to Chris Cain for useful feedback.
No functional change.
Where variable names are explicitly incorrect, I feel morally obligated to at least
suggest an alternative. There are many, but these two are especially egregious.
No functional change.
Currently the NORTH/WEST/SOUTH/EAST values are of type Square, but conceptually they are not squares but directions. This patch separates these values into a Direction enum and overloads addition and subtraction to allow adding a Square to a Direction (to get a new Square).
I have also slightly trimmed the possible overloadings to improve type safety. For example, it would normally not make sense to add a Color to a Color or a Piece to a Piece, or to multiply or divide them by an integer. It would also normally not make sense to add a Square to a Square.
This is a non-functional change.
Use different penalties for weaknesses in the pawn shelter
depending on whether it is on the king's file or not.
STC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 71617 W: 13471 L: 13034 D: 45112
LTC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 48708 W: 6463 L: 6187 D: 36058
Bench: 5322108
A pawn (according to all the searched positions of a bench run) is not supported 85% of the time,
(in current master it is either isolated, backward or "unsupported").
So it made sense to try moving the S(17, 8) "unsupported" penalty value into the base pawn value hoping for a more representative pawn value, and accordingly
a) adjust backward and isolated so that they stay more or less the same as master
b) increase the mg connected bonus in the supported case by S(17, 0) and let the Connected formula find a suitable eg value according to rank.
Tested as a simplification SPRT(-3, 1)
Passed STC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/5970dbd30ebc5916ff649dd6
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 19613 W: 3663 L: 3540 D: 12410
Passed LTC
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/597137780ebc5916ff649de3
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 24721 W: 3306 L: 3191 D: 18224
Bench: 5581946
Closes#1179
StepAttacks[] is misdesigned, the color dependance is specific
to pawns, and trying to generalise to king and knights, proves
neither useful nor convinient in practice.
So this patch reformats the code with the following changes:
- Use PieceType instead of Piece in attacks_() functions
- Use PseudoAttacks for KING and KNIGHT
- Rename StepAttacks[] into PawnAttacks[]
Original patch and idea from Alain Savard.
No functional change.
Closes#1086
This patch removes the empty rows at the beginning and at the end of
MobilityBonus[] and Protector[] arrays:
• reducing the size of MobilityBonus from 768 bytes to 512 bytes
• reducing the size of Protector from 1024 to 512 bytes
Also adds some comments and cleaner code for the arrays in pawns.cpp
No speed penalty (measured speed-up of 0.4%).
No functional change.
Closes#1018
Order the enum and the array the same way they appear around line 250.
Makes it much easier to follow.
Add comments in the array definition and critical rows.
Use same terminology as elsewhere in pawns.cpp
No functional change.
This patch tweaks some pawn values to favor flank attacks.
The first part of the patch increases the midgame psqt values of external pawns to launch more attacks (credits to user GuardianRM for this idea), while the second part increases the endgame connection values for pawns on upper ranks.
Passed STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,4.00]
Total: 34997 W: 6328 L: 6055 D: 22614
and LTC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,4.00]
Total: 13844 W: 1832 L: 1650 D: 10362
Bench: 5884767
Rename shift_bb() to shift(), and DELTA_S to SOUTH, etc.
to improve code readability, especially in evaluate.cpp
when they are used together:
old b = shift_bb<DELTA_S>(pos.pieces(PAWN))
new b = shift<SOUTH>(pos.pieces(PAWN))
While there fix some small code style issues.
No functional change.
If the opponent has a cramped position, opening a file often
helps him/her to exchange pieces, so it makes sense to reduce
the space bonus if there are open files.
Credits: Leonardo Ljubičić for the strategic idea, Alain Savard for the
implementation of the open files calculation, "CrunchyNYC" for the
compensation of the numerator.
STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 49112 W: 9239 L: 8900 D: 30973
LTC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,5.00]
Total: 89415 W: 12014 L: 11601 D: 65800
Bench: 7591630
On top of the usual conditions
a) some opponent in front (but no lever)
b) some neighbours (in front) (but no neighbour behind or same rank)
c) < rank_5
to find out if a pawn is backward we look at the squares in front of this pawn to reach the same rank as the next neighbour.
In current master, a pawn is backward if any of those squares is controlled by an enemy pawn on an adjacent file
In this version, a pawn is ALSO backward if any of those squares is occupied by an enemy pawn.
STC:
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/56fe7efd0ebc59301a3541f1
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 19051 W: 3557 L: 3433 D: 12061
LTC:
http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/56febc2d0ebc59301a354209
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 40810 W: 5619 L: 5526 D: 29665
Bench: 7525245
Resolves#614
Also a speedup(about 1%) on 64-bit w/o hardware popcnt
Retire Max15 and Full template parameters
(Contributed by Marco Costalba)
Now that we have just SW and HW versions, use
template default parameter to get rid of explicit
template parameters.
Retire bitcount.h and move the only defined
function to bitboard.h
No functional change
Resolves#620
Also inline defintions of SpaceMask and CenterBindMask.
Verified from assembly that compiler computes the values
at compile time, so it is also theoretical faster.
While there factor out scale factor evaluation.
No functional change.
