World Draughts Forum

There are still a few features missing compared to KingsRow or Cake. For example, DarkHorse currently does not support an opening book, multithreading, or DTW/MTC endgame databases. Training the neural networks takes quite a bit of time, so if I ever get around to training a new one, I may ...

Bert, the egdb dll is included as part of the CheckerBoard installation, so it's not really necessary to have it in an engine distribution.


The dll was probably not part of the checkerboard implementation in the past, right ? I can't check right now but I think the Kingsrow-Installation ...

Can you share more details related to the training process.
How many games/positions, which positions did you exclude.
Did you use a CPU or GPU for training, how long did it take.
Also very interesting that you use a policy network, how did you train that one, and do you have any insight in ...

Hello everyone,

Seeing that Cake had recently been released on GitHub motivated me to finally wrap up this project and upload it as well. I originally started working seriously on my checkers engine during the COVID pandemic, but sometime afterwards I gradually lost interest in programming, and the ...

How reasonable would it be to train a nnue-policy-network to use for move-ordering ? Has anyone already tried that ?

I' ve now dived a little into the topic and implemented NNUE for my checkers engine. It works suprisingly well even if you train only on the game result and not on shallow-searches or static-eval. However, I think much of the advantage in chess comes from using different input-features (half-kp and ...

Hello there,

How does one (typically) implement left/right imbalance ? What first comes to my mind is simply counting the pieces on the left and right side of the board but that seems to be a little too "unprecise".


(Happy holidays )
Greetings from germany

Having looked at the alphaZero/alphaGoZero papers, one shouldnt call the algorithm mcts because there are no longer random playouts at leaf nodes.

Hey,
do you guys use piece-square-tables besides history/killer/pv-moves for sorting ? If so, how did you generate the psqt's ?


Happy new year

Intresting :P 75M position is really a lot and I am not even close to that. Did you use a fixed ply search when generating those games ? If so, how many plies were sufficient ? I am currently doing a 7 ply search during the "generating-games"-part.Takes me quite some time to generate a lot of unique ...

Oh, I thought there were better index functions. Better = less memory :P

I am using this for checkers as well and initial resullts were quite promising. May I ask which optimization algorithm u use for the logistic regression ? I tried stochastic graidient descent which works but is still rather ...

Hey,
I am currently working on my evaluation function and wanted to copy the approach used by Scan and other programs. I use regions of the size 4x4 and need a good index function.

Currently, I use a base 5 index function which seems utterly wasteful.

(PseudoCode)


for(uint32_t i=0;i<8;++i ...

Hey,
are most engines using some version of YBW (Young brothers waint concept) for parallel search ? I tried lazy smp which seems to be quite popular among the chess engine scene nowadays. However, the speedup wasn`t much at all which means that I either implemented it incorrectly or lazy smp might ...

BertTuyt wrote:Yes several Draughts programs use an aspiration window.

Bert

Thats cool. May I ask how wide your window is ? I implemented aspiration Windows now and started with a very large window but I haven`t had the time to test it yet.


Robin

Hey,
Do you use aspiration windows in your draughts engine ? Is it worth implementing ? What I have read so far about aspiration windows is that it does help quite a bit when most evaluations only differ slightly (At least in chess engines it does help). I thought this might help in the endgame when ...