Arasan 10.0

[jdart]

Arasan 10.0 is available from http://www.arasanchess.org.

Changes in Arasan 10.0:
1) Fix to pawn scoring: a doubled pawn behind a passed pawn is no longer counted as passed also.
2) Changes to king safety and mobility scoring. Bishop and queen attacks and mobility are now checked in all directions (was formerly
only the "forward" direction).
3) Other scoring changes, including adjustments to piece trade scoring.
4) Multi-core/multi-procesor (SMP) support is now working, using the YBWC algorithm. However the "helpful master" concept is not yet implemented.
5) Now supports 6-man tablebases. Some fixes added to better tolerate
incomplete 6-man tb sets.
6) Checks in q-search are on by default now. Checking moves are generated for 1st two plies of q-search (configurable), but can be
extended in some cases.
7) Forced move extension tweaked - move generator marks move as forced when a singular check evasion that is not a winning capture exists.
8) Some changes also to late move reduction and recapture extension code.
9) Null move verification search was broken - it works now.
10) Another fix for draw scoring - avoid draw when opponent is lower rated
11) Arasan outputs more information to UCI clients during a search.
12) UCI time management fixes.

--Jon

[Graham Banks]

Thanks Jon.

Looking forward to seeing how Arasan 10.0 goes!

Regards, Graham.

[S.Taylor]

Does all this this increase the intrinsic playing strength (besides what it can support) by far?

[jdart]

I think it is stronger than 9.5, although probably not by a large amount. Certainly it is less buggy. It does better on some testsuites.

--Jon

[geots]

I think it is stronger than 9.5, although probably not by a large amount. Certainly it is less buggy. It does better on some testsuites.

--Jon

Thanks, Jon. Best to you.

[Henrik Dinesen]

Thx jon,

Now, 10) - how does that work? I mean how does Arasan determine rating-difference, except from an input - or is it it?

[swami]

10) Another fix for draw scoring - avoid draw when opponent is lower rated

How does it know that is playing a program which is some elo lower?

and Thanks for the program,Jon.

I will test this version in my tournament and some programs in Division 1,2 and 3 need updates,Glad that Arasan is updated.

[Werner]

Hi Jon,
thanks for the new version. I have a few questions:

the rc file is also used in uci mode?
to use 2CPU you must change search.ncpus=1 into 2 even in uci mode?
(here only 1 CPU is used even if uci setting was 2 CPUS)
how many CPUs are supported?

regards
Werner

[BBauer]

Same here. Arasanx runs only on 1 proc.
make profile-run gives an error.

make profile-run
../profile/arasanx -H 64000 -c 2 <../tests/prof
/bin/sh: cannot open ../tests/prof: No such file
make: *** [profile-run] Fehler 2

regards
Bernhard

[jdart]

It will only know rating and computer status when playing on a chess server with Winboard protocol.

--Jon