(just for fun) Crafty 25.0 JA UCI

[Jim Ablett]

Give me a little while, I will post a new version with a crafty rc file that will stick around I'll also make the number of threads selectable.

Jim.

[Dan Cooper]

Is there a setting to get Crafty to report eval from the engine's point of view and not White?

[Jim Ablett]

That's set in the wb2uci config file. I'll make that stick around too

Jim.

[Jim Ablett]

Here is link to new Crafty Uci JA builds. Only two builds required this time, 32 & 64 bit. Uci threads option will show only if you are using Fritz gui. Arena users with have to edit crafty.rc. These builds will dump all packaged files in current folder when first run and won't delete them on exit but will restore any files it sees are missing so for example if you delete crafty.rc, next time exe is run it will restore crafty.rc.

http://tinyurl.com/j4jyuws

Jim.

[hgm]

What I mean is with Uci isn't the gui is supposed to bypass the engine completely and handle the tablebase moves itself independently ?
.

No. Tablebases are only helpful for engines if they can probe those themselves during search, every time they encounter a position with <= 6 men. A GUI can only see the actual position in the game. So they can adjudicate games based on the theoretical tablebase result, but they cannot help engines in making a plan to convert a position with 10 men to a won 6-men position rather than a drawn one.

[Jim Ablett]

What I mean is with Uci isn't the gui is supposed to bypass the engine completely and handle the tablebase moves itself independently ?
.

No. Tablebases are only helpful for engines if they can probe those themselves during search, every time they encounter a position with <= 6 men. A GUI can only see the actual position in the game. So they can adjudicate games based on the theoretical tablebase result, but they cannot help engines in making a plan to convert a position with 10 men to a won 6-men position rather than a drawn one.

Thanks for clear explanation.

Jim.

[tpoppins]

Here is link to new Crafty Uci JA builds.
<...>
http://tinyurl.com/j4jyuws

Good job on the latest x64 build, Jim - works almost perfectly in the Fritz 15 GUI now.

When Jose posted his example build at the start of page 2 of this thread his exec allowed changing the number of threads but the engine was stuck at using just one. Your own 12-core build after that was locked to 1 core in the GUI, but was actually using all 12 cores on my box. Also both builds ignored the Stop Engine command from the GUI and kept consuming CPU cycles continuously. You solved all that, as well as the mate eval problem in the original source (for example, a mate in 13 for Black was reported correctly in Arena as "-M13", but under the Fritz GUI it showed something like "-#2174" instead of the expected "-#13").

There are only a couple of issues left.

a) The hash table size appears to be capped to 3072 in the GUI. This is on a dual Xeon X5670 48 GB box running Win 7 x64 Pro, and most of the engines I have used have no trouble using up to at least 32768.

b) Raising the hash table size from the default 1024 to the two higher options (2048 and 3072) has no effect, according to the Task Manager. Tried doing that via Change Main Engine -> Advanced menu screens as well as Properties in the engine window. All Crafty 25.0 builds I have tried (going back to the early versions using the WB2UCI wrapper) suffer from this limitation. However, I remember putting a corresponding option (don't remember exactly the syntaxis now) in the WB2UCI.ENG created a second dropbox in the engine's Properties dialog box, and changing values there did work (IIRC, I got 4096 to work, didn't try anything higher).

c) The total node count reported in the engine window is wrong. E.g. after running analysis for 10 minutes the engine reports 2147MN at the 9:20 mark (see the screenshot below). With the NPS being over 20 MN/s for most of this time, the node count should be over 11000MN.



I wonder if your latest x64 build is POPCNT-optimized. I remember seeing 40+ and even 60 MN/s with earlier builds; this one never seems to approach 30.

Thank you for the great work done so far.

[Jim Ablett]

I see if I can fix remaining issues. 64 bit Crafty that is in binary is non-popcount version.

Jim.

[bob]

Don't double-click on anything. Just install 'crafty-25-32-uci-ja.exe' as uci engine in your favourite Chess gui. It won't work from command line.

Thanks, Jim, indeed that works !

Question : How do you indicate the Nalimov path?
I modified crafty.rc for that, and indeed I got hits (blinking) on my Nalimov USB stick (but no tb=xxx numbers indicated in the Fritz GUI, is that normal?).
But when I looked at the crafty.rc after that, it was back to the original unmodified crafty.rc (the one with tbpath=d:\progra~1\arena\nalimov)

It won't report tb hits, but I verified it was accessing the egtb on my machine. It also supports multiple paths. However after each game the crafty.rc file got deleted.

This I can can with certainty: Crafty never removes the crafty.rc file. IN fact, the only place where it even modifies that file is in the autotune command...

[Jamal Bubker]

Thanks Jim for producing these new binaries