New engine releases 2020

[Dr.Wael Deeb]

Francesca 0.29 is released today, June 1st. You can download from www.silentshark.co.uk

From the readme file:

"Lots of changes. Improved endgame recognition (helped by new way of tracking material). Small
performance optimisations. Better concept of threat in the eval (pawn and minor piece threats).
Change to king safety to better consider threats and pieces in proximity to king. Bigger eval for
passed pawnscoring. Minor bugfixes.

Testing against other versions of Francesca and other engines shows a +45 ELO improvement at fast
timescales."

Thanks ....

A great chess program which plays extremely tactical chess against humans ....

Cheers,
Dr.D

[Terje]

Weiss 1.0 released - much less elo than previous release, but a crash fix and some new features hopefully make up for it

https://github.com/TerjeKir/weiss/releases/tag/v1.0

[mvanthoor]

Congrats

Should someone be interested in the development of Rustic:

I've spend a month removing all the bottlenecks from make/unmake/add_move, and refactoring the code to be as clean as possible. (That was becoming necessary, as Rust doesn't allow global mutable variables without unsafe code, and I got sick of passing a huge list of variables to each function.) This work is done now, so I could start the implementation of a search function and UCI module.

Then life happened.

Nothing bad, but I've just been very busy with arranging some personal stuff and redecorating part of my apartment. The development of the engine has been on hold. As soon as everything is wrapped up, I'll continue writing some more code to get this thing finished

[Terje]

Congrats

Should someone be interested in the development of Rustic:

I've spend a month removing all the bottlenecks from make/unmake/add_move, and refactoring the code to be as clean as possible. (That was becoming necessary, as Rust doesn't allow global mutable variables without unsafe code, and I got sick of passing a huge list of variables to each function.) This work is done now, so I could start the implementation of a search function and UCI module.

Then life happened.

Nothing bad, but I've just been very busy with arranging some personal stuff and redecorating part of my apartment. The development of the engine has been on hold. As soon as everything is wrapped up, I'll continue writing some more code to get this thing finished

Thanks, and nice to hear you didn't quit - I got a bit worried seeing it had been 3 weeks since the last commit the other day

[Werner]

Francesca 0.29 is released today, June 1st. You can download from www.silentshark.co.uk

Hi, is it possible legacy version is for older CPUs and fran.exe is with bmi2 instructions?
(fran.exe here crashes on a core I7 ivy bridge)

[mvanthoor]

Thanks, and nice to hear you didn't quit - I got a bit worried seeing it had been 3 weeks since the last commit the other day

Thanks for the concern, but no, I haven't quit.

The thing is, my eyesight is very poor (34% at best after correction). In addition, I'm waiting for a cataract operation, which doesn't make things better to say the least.

During the day, I work as a software engineer. Writing the chess engine is something I have to do in the evenings or weekends. I can only maintain that much screen time for a number of weeks before I reach a threshold I dare not cross; if I do, I'll end up with a sort tiredness that'll take me a week or more to recover from.

I have to cut back on screen time before this happens, as I obviously can't just drop out from my day job for a few days every few weeks.

Therefore I work in bursts on projects such as these. Most other hobbies are on hold during this time. I write some function (or functions, as part of a piece of functionality), then test and refactor this exhaustively, until I feel it can't be improved anymore. When a function reaches that state, I take a break from personal programming and dedicate some time to other stuff, and I only use a computer during personal time when needed or required.

And yes, sometimes that break can anything from 1-6 weeks. I can't know this beforehand. It depends on many factors; how I feel, how busy work is, things / other obligations I have to do, and so on. Eventually I'll restart, and I'll do the next part.

In this case, the next part will be a (simple) alpha-beta function, then the UCI function, and then some PSQT's. Then the very first Rustic version will be finished.

[Terje]

Thanks, and nice to hear you didn't quit - I got a bit worried seeing it had been 3 weeks since the last commit the other day

Thanks for the concern, but no, I haven't quit.

The thing is, my eyesight is very poor (34% at best after correction). In addition, I'm waiting for a cataract operation, which doesn't make things better to say the least.

During the day, I work as a software engineer. Writing the chess engine is something I have to do in the evenings or weekends. I can only maintain that much screen time for a number of weeks before I reach a threshold I dare not cross; if I do, I'll end up with a sort tiredness that'll take me a week or more to recover from.

I have to cut back on screen time before this happens, as I obviously can't just drop out from my day job for a few days every few weeks.

Therefore I work in bursts on projects such as these. Most other hobbies are on hold during this time. I write some function (or functions, as part of a piece of functionality), then test and refactor this exhaustively, until I feel it can't be improved anymore. When a function reaches that state, I take a break from personal programming and dedicate some time to other stuff, and I only use a computer during personal time when needed or required.

And yes, sometimes that break can anything from 1-6 weeks. I can't know this beforehand. It depends on many factors; how I feel, how busy work is, things / other obligations I have to do, and so on. Eventually I'll restart, and I'll do the next part.

In this case, the next part will be a (simple) alpha-beta function, then the UCI function, and then some PSQT's. Then the very first Rustic version will be finished.

Good luck with the operation, and with Rustic when you get back to it

[silentshark]

Thanks ....

A great chess program which plays extremely tactical chess against humans ....

Cheers,
Dr.D

Very kind words. Thank you

[silentshark]

Francesca 0.29 is released today, June 1st. You can download from www.silentshark.co.uk

Hi, is it possible legacy version is for older CPUs and fran.exe is with bmi2 instructions?
(fran.exe here crashes on a core I7 ivy bridge)

I think that's right. The version fran.exe is compiled with the /arch:AVX2 flag in visual studio, which might imply BMI2 instructions.. couldn't see mention of it in the Visual Studio docs, though. Does anyone else know?

In short, if you are on recent hardware, fran.exe is the one. If not, try legacy.exe. I think the performance diff isn't much anyhow.

[Norbert Raimund Leisner]

RubiChess 1.7.3 (TCEC - S18) https://github.com/Matthies/RubiChess/releases