Is Crafty the fastest searcher in the world?

[Jouni]

Surprisingly I don't have any engine, that has so high node speed than Crafty 23.4 - spark is next best with 70-80% of Crafty's speed
Or is Crafty counting nodes more "carefully" than others?

Jouni

[hgm]

Crafty does not do hash probing in QS, which is a good way to crank up nps. (Unfortunately it also cranks up nodes...)

[huybaichay]

Crafty does not do hash probing in QS, which is a good way to crank up nps. (Unfortunately it also cranks up nodes...)

I don't think so, Many other chess engines don't do hash probing in QS .

[Dann Corbit]

The fastest searcher is the one with the lowest branching factor.

[bob]

Surprisingly I don't have any engine, that has so high node speed than Crafty 23.4 - spark is next best with 70-80% of Crafty's speed
Or is Crafty counting nodes more "carefully" than others?

Jouni

Crafty is simply an older program that has been extensively optimized for speed. And there is likely more speed to be had. So far as I know, a "node" in Crafty is the same as a "node" in any other AI context. That is, when a move is made to take the search to a new position, that is also one node searched since node == position. I don't try to "guess" how many nodes a hash hit saves and add that in, so it is really counting Make()/Unmake() pairs as a single node, which is traditional.