mar wrote: ↑Thu Jun 03, 2021 1:20 am
well, there's nothing special about the psq tables in "PeSTO" except that they're tuned.
PeSTO (the engine) is strong solely due to its superior search.
when I replaced my whole HCE with PSQ tables from PeSTO, I lost 200 elo immediately.
Obviously, as you removed all of your dynamic knowledge...
reaching 3k is really hard (those who claim otherwise are either liars or frauds
- I'm like 30-40 elo away on single core (CCRL 40/15) - all I can say that you need both a very good search and eval to even think about reaching it. I can't imagine any 3k engine whose eval isn't tuned.
I know; my personal goal is 2895, to be able to defeat my long-time default chess engine Fritz 11 by proxy in a match
(Currently I'm not using Fritz 11 as an engine anymore, but I still use the GUI...)
a good evaluation function is worth hundreds of elo, with PSQ only you lack basically everything that forms a decent evaluation function.
it's also important to understand which types of endgames are drawish and either avoid those or enter those (because even in midgame, the engine considers lots of simplifications at the tip of its search)
I hope to have a bit of an advantage here, because I'm a fairly decent chess player; i.e., it's probably easier for me to write a good evaluation, than to write a good search. (Without having to heavily research the topic.)
as for hitting a wall - nullmove and LMR should give you a massive elo boost, tuning your eval will give you a massive elo boost as well
Tuning, null move and LMR are on the agenda after killers, pvs, aw, and history
The "hitting the wall" was meant because of the fact that I added two functions to the engine which barely gained any Elo in a somewhat slower gauntlet, but as said: I think Niels nailed it. The slower gauntlet has MUCH longer searches, obviously, and having no bounds on the history (and also increasing it unnecessarily in the alpha region) probably messed up the move ordering. That would negate much of the speed increase given by other functions.
As I merged everything into master already (because the additions did work in the hyper-fast test), I just disabled everything but the killer moves, and I'm going to re-test again and re-add / rewrite per function.