This apparentely silly tweak allows
to speed up the bench by almost 3%.
Not clear why, repeating with perft,
the speed up vanishes.
Suggested by Jonathan Calovski.
No functional change.
Believed to be a speed optimization as benched
on Windows with bench realtime affinity 0x1 deleting
highest and lowest runs:
Base Test
1549259 1608202
1538115 1583934
1543168 1556938
1536365 1554179
1533026 1582010
Signature remains unchanged and gives anywhere from 1-2% nps
boost in analysis depending on number of cores used.
No functional change.
This is a very discussed patch with many
argumentations pro and against. The fact is
it passed both STC:
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 16305 W: 3001 L: 2855 D: 10449
And LTC
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,6.00]
Total: 34273 W: 5180 L: 4931 D: 24162
Although it is true that a correct test should
include foreign engines, we commit it anyhow so
people can test it out in the wild, under broader
conditions.
bench: 7384368
Idea from Lyudmil Tsvetkov.
The value seems to be raised a bit abruptly, but as
Gary said, a blocked pawn on the sixth rank has been
instrumental in limiting king mobility in multiple
losses that I've seen from SF. A blocked pawn on fifth
rank is much less serious on the king safety impact.
Passed both STC
LLR: 2.97 (-2.94,2.94) [-1.50,4.50]
Total: 14551 W: 2750 L: 2607 D: 9194
and LTC
LLR: 2.96 (-2.94,2.94) [0.00,6.00]
Total: 43595 W: 6917 L: 6618 D: 30060
And even a retest at 60" fixed games 40K
ELO: 1.79 +-1.9 (95%) LOS: 97.0%
Total: 39889 W: 6018 L: 5813 D: 28058
bench: 7154916
Adding BMI1 allows the compiler to use _blsr_u64
automatically (the advertised 0.3% speed gain).
I verified that the compiler does not use this
instruction with the -mbmi2 flag only. Also, all
processors supporting BMI2 is also supporting BMI1.
No functional change
Prefer
file_of(s) < file_of(ksq)
to the inidrect
file_of(ksq) < FILE_E
To evaluate if semiopen side to check is the left side.
Also other small touches while there.
No functional change.
Right now the Makefile is cluttered with OS X equivalents
of all the x86 targets. We can get rid of all of them and
just check UNAME against "Darwin" for the few OS X-specific
things we need to do.
We also disable Clang LTO when using BMI2 instructions. For
some reason, LLVM cannot find the PEXT instruction when using
LTO. I don't know why, but disabling LTO for BMI2 fixes it.
No functional change.
Intel Haswell and newer CPUs can calculate sliders
attacks using special PEXT asm instructions instead
of magic bitboards. This gives a +3% speed up.
To enable it just compile with ARCH=x86-64-bmi2
No functional change.
Retire software pext and introduce hardware
call when USE_PEXT is defined during compilation.
This is a full complete implementation of sliding
attacks using PEXT.
No functional change.
Reshuffle functions to define them in reverse
calling order (C style).
This allow us to define templates before they are
used. Currently it is not like this, for instance
evaluate_pieces is defined after do_evaluate that
calls it. This happens to work for some strange
reason (two phase lookup?) but we want to avoid
code that works 'by magic'.
As a nice side-effect we can now remove the function
prototypes.
No functional change.
This is more consistent with what other engines are doing.
Often people thinks that SF's scores are overblown. In the
end, it just boils down to the arbitrary way of rescaling them.
No functional change.
I have noticed that increasing the bench depth produces
progressively smaller and slightly faster executables at
the cost of longer compile times. Also using bench "time"
instead of "depth" seems to produce slightly smaller/faster
executables given comparable compile times.
I have made a new Makefile that generates smaller and
about 1% to 2% faster profile executables at only a
little extra compile time. On my mobile 2GHz i7 a
full profile build time goes from 3'48" to 4'13" and
the exe goes down by 5% from 416,310 bytes to 395,567
bytes.
No functional change.
Small simplification.
Passed SPRT(-3,1) both at STC:
LLR: 2.95 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 17051 W: 3132 L: 3005 D: 10914
and LTC:
LLR: 4.55 (-2.94,2.94) [-3.00,1.00]
Total: 24890 W: 3842 L: 3646 D: 17402
The rationale behind this is that I've never managed to add a
Queen on 7th rank bonus in DiscoCheck, because it never showed
to be positive (evne slightly) in testing. The only thing that
worked is Rook on 7th rank.
In terms of SF code, it seemed natural to group it with QueenOnPawn
as well as those are done together. I know you're against groupping
in general, but when it comes to non regression test, you are being
more conservative by groupping. If the group passes SPRT(-3,1) it's
safer to commit, than test every component in SPRT(-3,1) and end up
with the risk of commiting several -1 elo regression instead of just
one -1 elo regression.
In chess terms, perhaps it's just easier to manouver a Queen (which
can more also diagonaly) than a Rook. Therefore you can let the search
do its job without needing eval ad-hoc terms to guide it. For the Rook
which takes more moves to manouver such eval terms can be (marginally)
useful.
bench: 7473314
Marco Costalba