Rodin v7.0 released

[Kempelen]

Hi,

I have released Rodin v7.0 It can be downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/clonfsp/r ... ess-engine

It is stronger than v6.0. The Elo gain will depend on time control, but maybe around 50 or more ELO points.

There are many features, but most important ones are:
- A more accurate and tuned eval function.
- Better time management.
- Improvements in some search parts.
- Speed optimizations.

Note that I have not programmed Rodin for ultrafast games ( < 10 secs), in fact I suspect there should not be any signficant elo gain playing so.

I have detected a bug, unfixed yet, which hang Rodin when playing multiple games in the same executable instance.

Thanks all of you who makes this project possible and motivate me.

Best regards,
Fermin

[Andres Valverde]

Congrats Fermin, good work!

[Graham Banks]

Thanks Fermin.

[cdani]

Congrats! ¡Felicidades!

[Kempelen]

I have detected a bug, unfixed yet, which hang Rodin when playing multiple games in the same executable instance.

Thank you , Fermin.

Would you please explain the bug in greater detail? I think I have found that in certain circumstances v6.0 does something which makes the chess pieces move unsmoothly, so we may be speaking about the same thing.

Best wishes,

Thanks all!!!

What does you mean by "unsmoothly"? illegal moves?

I use winboard to test the engine. It runs into my own engine manager which lanch each winboard-rodin-other_engine game. So after each game, Rodin exit.
If I use Rodin at ICC or FICS, after some games have been played in a row (usually > 5), in the middle of a game, it unexpectly exit. I suspect it will also happend if you reuse the engine to play some games in a row without exit in a test environment.

[Kempelen]

What does you mean by "unsmoothly"? illegal moves?

No, the moves are legal but the pieces' move on the board is fragmented, the video display is affected. And in all of the GUI's that I use at that time (usually 3 tournaments simultaneously, under different GUI's) the pieces move is fragmented, not only in the GUI under which Rodin plays.
I noticed that when this happens there are usually two Rodin instances running and a special program I use to watch internet broadcasts is also running.
I tried to discover some regularity in this so that I can report it to you but the above was all I could come up with so I decide not to report.
I also found that the only thing that fixed this situation was restarting the computer.
Maybe there is some memory allocation error here.

That is the first time I hear about something similar. It is possible to be related with the bug I said, but if there is not any bad behaviour, only a slowdown video issue, that could be a lack of enough memory for the video card, or for the cpu to serve it. Maybe you could make a test reducing TT size. Also see the memory allocation in a process-viewer It is the only thing that comes to my mind....
Maybe this new version does not have the problem. Anyway I will try my best to fix that annoyed bug, altough I have spend a lot of time before without success. Very maddening....

[asanjuan]

Good news.
Congratulations.

[Kempelen]

I am sorry to report this but I am encountering crashes under Arena all the time so I had to interrupt my tournament with Rodin.

Hello Gabor,

I am sad about this. Sorry that you have wasted your time only to find it has some kind of bug. Maybe it is related with the one I said in release noted.

I would like to fix it. Please could you provide me the info about conditions:
1.- Windows version
2.- time settings
3.- ponder
4.- opening book? egbb?
5.- Does the bug show a popup windows error message, or does it dead infinitly?
6.- Do you re-use the engine after each game or have you set it to always use the some instance after each game (in tournament conditions)?
7.- Does it hangs in the first game of the tournament?
8.- Which winboard protocol have you set?

A log file would be much appreciated.

Thank you very much for your support,
Fermin

[Kempelen]

In 21 games, played with white and black as well, there were no crashes, so it seems that restarting the engine after each game helps.

Glad to see is running ok now. It must be related with the bug I wrote in release notes. In ICC when running a few games in a row, without restarting the engine, it hangs. I have not found yet the solution, and will dedicate following month all my resources only to find it. It is a very annoying bug.

[Leto]

Hi Fermin, looking forward to a UCI release.