Floyd 0.7 released

[mvk]

Floyd is an "as simple as possible" chess engine I use for study purposes and prototyping of new ideas. I made a couple changes recently and now release these as version 0.7 for Windows, OSX and Linux:

Executables: https://marcelk.net/floyd/
Source code: https://github.com/kervinck/floyd

From the release notes:

Version 0.7
Main changes:
- Strength increase of about 150 elo at fast time controls
- Full UCI support: pondering, mate & node limited search, searchmoves
- Slightly improved pawn and passer evaluation
- Stopping of search after having established the shortest mate
Under the hood:
- Some workarounds for pondering under cutechess-cli 0.8.0 beta
- Implementation of "moves [ depth <ply> ]" command
- Mate distance pruning
- Simple killers
- Simple cut node reductions
- Simple lazy move generation in scout
- Simple static exchange evaluation (SEE)
- Faster evaluation tuning using multiprocessing and quadratic fitting
- General code cleanup, such as the removal of needless SAN output code

Note for Arena 3.5 users: This Arena version suffers from a severe UCI bug which causes time forfeits when playing ponder-on games. This bug in Arena was also reported using many other engines and is still unsolved. Use Arena 3.0 if you want to use pondering.

Feedback:

Bug reports and improvement proposals are appreciated. When reporting a problem, please provide at least the following details:
1. your configuration (OS+version, GUI+version and Floyd version),
2. what steps you have to take before you encounter the problem,
3. what you observe when the problem happens (debug/log files are the best for this), and
4. what you expected to happen instead.

Enjoy!

[Graham Banks]

- Strength increase of about 150 elo at fast time controls

Excellent!

[Damir]

Hi Marcel

What is the strength of your engine, meassured in elo ?

[Sylwy]

THANK YOU !

[mvk]

What is the strength of your engine, meassured in elo ?

We won't know until it is independently tested. It should be sub-IM level because it is an almost empty shell containing just simple elements without optimisations.

[supersharp77]

What is the strength of your engine, meassured in elo ?

We won't know until it is independently tested. It should be sub-IM level because it is an almost empty shell containing just simple elements without optimisations.

Thank You! AR

[Sylwy]

Hi !

1.-Floyd uses many elements from Rookie source ?
2.-How strong (in Elo) is the most recent Rookie ?

Thank you !

[Sylwy]

http://talkchess.com/forum/viewtopic.ph ... 25&t=50060

[cdani]

Nice!

[mvk]

Hi !

1.-Floyd uses many elements from Rookie source ?
2.-How strong (in Elo) is the most recent Rookie ?

Thank you !

1. A few ideas in Floyd come from Rookie, but the move generator is a derivative of MSCP's for simplicity. There are also some ideas in Floyd that are not in Rookie yet.
2. On the CCRL scale I estimate Rookie v3 to be 2850-2900.
3. Thank you for testing!