World Draughts Forum

Hi Krzysztof,

There is a new Ares version 1.53d on the FTP-server. In my tests it is about 4 Elo stronger than the previous version. The N/s went down somewhat, this is because it enters the quiescence search less frequently, and not because the engine is slower.

Joost

Hi Sidiki, I tried to mail you, somehow it doesn't work, my mail-server doesn't want to send out mail to you. Maybe the problem is on my end, I don't know, I will take a look at it today. Today or tomorrow I will put the new version 1.53d on the FTP-server, in single core tests it improved about 4 E...

Krzysztof, In the mean time I made a small change that makes the engine somewhat better at tactics. I'm testing it right now, when it is really better according to my tests, I will bump the version to 1.53d and send you the new version. I'm also working on a simple GUI (Windows only) to make the en...

The win (and only win in this match) of Ares in game 123 is a little strange. The move from KR 43. 20-15 was definitely wrong and losing, whereas 43. 28-22 27x18 44. 42-37 41x43 45. 49x38 is a draw. I expect that with 16-cores KR would not have search problems. Ed, can you give some light, is this ...

The win (and only win in this match) of Ares in game 123 is a little strange. The move from KR 43. 20-15 was definitely wrong and losing, whereas 43. 28-22 27x18 44. 42-37 41x43 45. 49x38 is a draw. I expect that with 16-cores KR would not have search problems. Ed, can you give some light, is this ...

Krzysztof, In the mean time I made a small change that makes the engine somewhat better at tactics. I'm testing it right now, when it is really better according to my tests, I will bump the version to 1.53d and send you the new version. I'm also working on a simple GUI (Windows only) to make the eng...

Another possibility I'm thinking about is to use small overlapped patterns e.g. 3 bits or 5 bits and combining the indices by means of a NN. With one-hot encoding you will get a huge number of inputs, but with NNUE this is not a big problem. The incremental update will be slower because for most squ...

Hi all, I announce the Blitz tournament of draughts engines That will start to 19 to 21 October All details here : http://results.fmjd.org/tournaments/2022/f_1089/ Friendly, Sidiki On what kind of hardware you want to run this tournament? If this is on 1 computer only you have to make sure that pon...

In C++20 there is also 'consteval' to declare an immediate function that has to be evaluated at compile-time and always produces a compile-time constant. This is more strict than 'constexpr' which can be used at run-time as well. The last years C++ is getting extremely complicated, I take my hat off...

Because template meta-programming is Turing complete you can do these things. It's is a nice programming exercise, often these techniques are not very usable in practice though. Ah but this is not template-metaprogramming. Just a regular perft() function but called inside a static_assert(), so done...

Because template meta-programming is Turing complete you can do these things. It's is a nice programming exercise, often these techniques are not very usable in practice though.

The 2990WX is 4 years old, it is sold out everywhere. Maybe you could get some used ones from Ebay, but I would not advice this.

I will not buy it anymore. It is an expense of several thousand euros. And as you wrote Joost there is a small difference between the AVX-512 and the AVX2. Understandable, to run your tournament with pondering you'll need two systems, this would make it twice as expensive. Of course you could also ...

This week (27 Sept.) the AMD 7950X processor will see the daylight, with16 cores, AVX-512, using DDR5 memory and a base clock of 4.5 GHz. This is probably the best and cheapest option if you want to make use of programs designed for AVX-512. You may want to look at the preliminary benchmarks here: h...

If I understand correctly, all these results are without reusing intermediate results of transpositions? Would that be considered cheating for this exercise? This is just to determine the correctness of the move-generator and to see how fast the move-gen/move-make logic is. In this case I think tha...