Fizbo 1.8 released

[ymatioun]

Version 1.8 of Fizbo chess engine has just been released. It can be downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/fizbochessengine/

Here are release notes:

1. added BMI2 executable.
2. reworked and improved pondering logic, fixing pondering time-out bug. Now the engine should never time out, with or without pondering.
3. reworked parallel search logic. Now it should scale a lot better running on >4 CPUs. This also fixed a bug that sometimes crashed the engine when running on 10 or more CPUs. This bug manifested itself during TCEC9, where Fizbo kept crashing running on 20 cores, and had to be restricted to 10 cores. And it still crashed once. Scaling for 4 CPUs appears to be largely unchanged (still not very good).
4. multiple small changes to search and evaluation, resulting in approximately +40 ELO improvement in playing strength.

Youri.

[Graham Banks]

Thanks Youri. Always enjoy Fizbo games.

[cdani]

Nice!! Will be terrible strong opponent

[IWB]

The very first game was already a loss on time for Fritz



Not for Fizbo


Thanks for the version!

Ingo

[jpqy]

Thank you Youri ..also for this BMI2 compile

JP.

[Damir]

Thanks Youri.

[carldaman]

Thanks a lot, Youri!

Cheers,
CL