Caipora 3.8 released: new Rust UCI engine from Brazil, own NNUE

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Zigoto
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Joined: Thu Oct 01, 2026 5:43 pm
Full name: Matheus de Carvalho Jesus

Caipora 3.8 released: new Rust UCI engine from Brazil, own NNUE

Post by Zigoto »

Caipora is a new UCI engine from Brazil, written from scratch in Rust (bitboards with magics, PVS, NNUE, Lazy SMP). This is its first announcement here, and I would be glad if the CCRL testers would consider it.

Download: github.com/ComputecOrg/caipora/releases/tag/v3.8 (Windows and Linux, AVX2 and generic x86-64 builds; the network is embedded, no extra file needed)
Source: github.com/ComputecOrg/caipora (GPL-3.0-or-later)

Strength: our own gauntlet at 8+0.08, 1 thread, 300 games each against Stash 33 and Stash 37 (86.7% and 74.5%) puts it at about 3600 +/- 25 on the CCRL Blitz scale. That is only an estimate, and I would be glad to see a real one. On Lichess it plays as caiporaBot (blitz around 2890).

Engine:
  • Search: PVS, aspiration windows, singular extensions with multi-cut, null move, LMR with expected cut-node tracking, LMP, futility and SEE pruning, threat-aware quiet and capture histories, continuation and correction histories, Lazy SMP, pondering.
  • Evaluation: NNUE (768x8 mirrored king buckets -> 1024)x2 -> 8 material output buckets, SCReLU, trained with bullet on Leela Chess Zero data (ODbL). The first networks were trained on Caipora's own self-play. No third-party network is used, not even as a starting point.
  • Standard chess and Chess960/DFRC. UCI options: Hash, Threads, Move Overhead, Ponder, UCI_Chess960, EvalFile.
How it is written: the code is written by Claude Code (Anthropic's AI) under my direction. I decide what to try, review it and test it; every change that affects strength passes an SPRT before it is merged, and every commit is co-authored by Claude. Ideas from other engines and papers are reimplemented, never copied. The full policy is in AI_USAGE.md in the repository. The project started on 26 September 2026, and its full history, including every SPRT result, is public there.

Credits: bullet by Jamie Whiting (training); Leela Chess Zero data (ODbL) via Linrock's binpacks; fastchess and Stash (testing).

Feedback and bug reports are very welcome.

Matheus de Carvalho Jesus
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Sylwy
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Re: Caipora 3.8 released: new Rust UCI engine from Brazil, own NNUE

Post by Sylwy »