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CECP is quite complex and there are a number of nasty corner cases and possible timing issues. I read from stdin in a separate thread. That thread places all incoming received commands into a stack. Commands are then processed by reading from the stack, usually in order, but there are exceptions. Pe...

Most UCI engines delegate all the book interface to the GUI that is driving them. If you want a book interface, it would be much simpler to use something like Polyglot, which is open source, vs. building your own book storage/retrieval system. Polyglot basically uses a Zobrist hash of the position t...

I have an older version of this. It is quite selective: not a lot of variety in the lines played, but it will steer into lines it thinks are good. There are equally good alternatives. If you are going to spend money on something, I'd recommend the Hiarcs opening book, which is quite large and update...

Intel VTune for this. It's normally very expensive, but for opensource/non-corporate use, it's free

VTune is only free for non-commerical use on Linux. If you're on the Windows platform, you can get a free trial version, though.

"Best Single Versions" for 40/20 has 3 versions of Lc0 and 2 versions of Komodo MCTS:

http://www.cegt.net/40_40%20Rating%20Li ... liste.html

I use an annotated PGN file for inputting and maintaining manually tuned weights and opening lines. I edit these in Chessbase, export to PGN, and build the opening book from that PGN + selected unannotated PGN from human, computer, and correspondence games. Arasan has a custom format opening book, a...

One example: you detect a draw before you have searched any moves. Now, if the previous move was illegal you don't want to return a draw score. You should return an illegal move indicator of some kind. I return -Illegal, which comes back to the caller (which inverts the score) as the constant Illega...

In general though, whenever you have any early exit from search, you should take care that you are correctly handling the case of a previous illegal move.

The whole line starting 12. Nxe5 and going through 15. .. a5 has actually been played in multiple games, for example Ivanchuk-So, Tata Steel-A 2015. Pavlovic annotating this says "it had been worked out by computers," so it was known previously and apparently found by at least some engines, maybe in...

I think the main problem with test sets like STS is age That's a valid point. Unless there's a forced mate or tablebase win, deeper search can always possibly find a hole in existing analysis. Although my understanding is STS is really designed to test positional understanding, not tactics, so that...