Alaric Development Log

One or two of my reductions are buggy. From my test it has to be my implementation of Tord's probably FH pruning and/or my statistical pruning. Both with good results in previous tests. Now they both got the results very low when on and very high when off:

• AlaricNoTo........26,5
• AlaricNoSt.........20,5
• AlaricSt................6,5
• AlaricTo...............6,0

If I sum all the results where St and To was on I get:

• St...............116,5
• To..............110

Compare with IID for instance that got 131

So I turned them off and started a "deeper" look.

Went to Lübeck. No Alaric here but the test will be running...

I corrected a bug and the program went worse...
What does that indicate? I suppose that there is another bug that interference with the other. So now I will start a big test. Described below.
The bug
In the Quiescense I should have something like this:
pmove=GenMoves(....) // will set pointer to first pmove
while (pmove->ok) {
....MakeMove(pmove)
....pmove=GenMoves(....) // will set next pmove pointer
}
the bug was that I had MakeMove(pmove++) meaning that every second capture was removed from Quiescense!
When I fixed this bug the program went worse. At least in my first tests.

The big test
I suspect that one of my extensions/prunings are the source for this. The tournament will consist of:

• AlaricAll (Everything on)
• AlaricClean (No nothing on. Just search)
• AlaricHa (Hashtab on - nothing else)
• AlaricSt (Statistical prune on - nothing else)
• AlaricTo (Tords Prob FH pruning on - nothing else)
• AlaricIID (IID on - nothing else)
• AlaricSEE (SEE on - nothing else)
• AlaricPV (FullPV on - nothing else) No prune if (beta-alpha>1)
• AlaricDr (Draw detection on - nothing else) Detect eternal draws
• AlaricNoHa (Everything on except Hashtabs)
• AlaricNoSt (Everything on except Statistical pruning)
• AlaricNoTo (Everything on except Tords ProbFH pruning)
• AlaricNoIID (Everything on except IID)
• AlaricNoSEE (Everything on except SEE)
• AlaricNoPV (Everything on except Full PV)
• AlaricNoDr (Everything on except Draw detection)

I will start with a gauntlet AlaricAll vs the rest with the Nunn positions.

After a few wonderful weeks in Brazil I'm back in Sweden and now when Terra 3.4 is finally released I can go back to Alaric development again!

• The endgame development will continue
• Search & move order tricks are constantly under test.

BTW. Where do all the new very strong engines come from? A new engine today is much stronger than any new engine 3 years ago (Ruffian not counted...)

I've changed my development log at the Alaric site to a blog.
This will make it easier for me to make fast updates of the log.
The Alaric updates, though, will be as hard as before I'm afraid...