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12 daysDynamic move ordering overhaul: continuation-history, evidence-gatedScott Gasch
countermove promotion, retired hung-piece-escape and NumLeftoverMovesToSelect. Full session was built on a "measure the pick, not the game" methodology: aggregate solve counts on curated suites are too noisy to tune move-ordering knobs against, so most decisions here came from per-move fail-high/alpha-raise rates at much larger sample sizes (leftover FH% instrumentation, a zero- selection-budget diagnostic that isolates a single best-of-remaining pick, and evidence-bucket calibration), not solve-count deltas alone. See CLAUDE.md's "Dynamic move ordering experiments" section for the reusable methodology and generate.c's _ScoreAllMoves comment for the resulting ordering hierarchy. Changes: - Added g_ContinuationHistory: same growth/decay math as the existing g_HistoryCounters butterfly table, additionally keyed by the previous move, so its magnitude is self-calibrated rather than a hand-picked constant. Flat, sufficient response across a 256x scale sweep. - Countermove-table matches now get a real GOOD_MOVE-tier promotion (previously the table was write-only, tracked for stats but never read for ordering), but only when the match's own accumulated history+continuation evidence clears COUNTERMOVE_EVIDENCE_THRESHOLD (10,000) -- a raw match with no track record was shown to perform identically to an ordinary leftover (~0.6-0.85% FH), so promoting on match alone would have repeated hung-piece-escape's mistake below. - Retired hung-piece-escape's unconditional GOOD_MOVE-tier promotion. Evidence-calibration showed the overwhelming majority of triggers (a zero-evidence population 250-1000x larger than countermove's) performed at the plain-leftover baseline -- the promotion was mostly free tier- escape treatment for moves that hadn't earned it. Replaced with FLEE_BONUS, a flat same-tier nudge inside SelectBestWithHistory (never escapes GOOD_MOVE/leftover classification, unlike a generation-time promotion) at the magnitude found to plateau a same-tier-nudge sweep. - Retired NumLeftoverMovesToSelect (the depth-indexed budget on how many leftover moves got a full selection scan before falling back to unsorted order). search.c's main move loop now always fully selects -- the leftover pool was shown to contain real, findable signal a bailout budget was discarding for a node-count savings that didn't hold up net- net once measured by solve counts and fail-high rates rather than raw node counts (noisy on small suites independent of this change). - Collapsed leftover-move instrumentation from sorted/raw pairs down to a single set now that "raw" (unsorted fallback) is structurally impossible; kept the countermove evidence-bucket calibration counters (ongoing check that COUNTERMOVE_EVIDENCE_THRESHOLD stays well- calibrated); removed the contested-node A/B harness and hung-piece evidence calibration now that the decisions they were built to inform are made. Net effect on the three curated suites (sd 10): solve counts wash (tied, +1, -1 across ringers/confident/hard), leftover fail-high rate improved consistently on all three (the intended, directly-measured target of this work). Not yet validated beyond sd 10 -- an sn-based run or eval_tune/match_play.py head-to-head gate is the natural next check before leaning on this as a proven strength gain rather than a directionally- sound, sd-10-clean change. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014XePz6Sk4qQsTaP2jVJWJu
12 daysSwitch to Crafty-style killer ordering; fix mvNullmoveRefutations ↵Scott Gasch
type-mixing bug and add a quiet-refutation killer backfill. Killer tiers now try both of this ply's own killers before either ply-2-back one, matching Crafty's ordering. Two earlier attempts at this same swap were reverted for regressing; this pass lands on top of NumLeftoverMovesToSelect (more SelectBestWithHistory budget to reach these lower-tier slots) and a real bug fix below, and beats interleaved order head-to-head on solves, node count, and first-move beta cutoff across the three curated suites. The bug: mvNullmoveRefutations's empty-killer-slot backfill could only ever contain a capturing move (TryNullmovePruning only wrote it inside the capture-refutation branch), but IS_SAME_MOVE's mask includes the pCaptured bits, so that backfilled value could never match a real quiet candidate -- the backfill was silently dead code. Fixed by recording genuinely quiet null-move refutations into a new, separate mvNullmoveQuietRefutations array (kept separate so it can't clobber the capture history mvNullmoveRefutations still needs for the Botvinnik-Markoff same-piece-two-squares extension check) and backfilling the regular killer table from that instead. The check-evasion killer table intentionally does *not* get this backfill: a null-move refutation can never legitimately be an escaping-check move (null moves can't deliver check), so backfilling there risks IS_SAME_MOVE cross-context false positives instead of the old guaranteed-inert no-op. Measured at sd10 across ecm_ringers/ecm_confident_quick/ecm_hard_quick against head_reference (commit d11e973): 115/191 solves (vs. 116 baseline), 924.36M total nodes (vs. 933.23M), first-move beta cutoff within 0.1-0.9 points of baseline on all three suites -- and clearly better than the same fix under interleaved order (113/191 solves, 963.10M nodes), which loses to head_reference on every metric. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01EortUUkDVpsfrbqshBJYJg
12 daysDocument the three-curated-suites testing methodology and theScott Gasch
head_reference protocol. Realized while asking "where is this documented" that it wasn't -- scattered implicitly across lmr_testing/RESULTS.md and head_reference/README.md but never stated as a methodology anywhere durable. Also records the sd-vs-sn guidance (pick based on what the change is expected to affect) and flags the specific gap that cost real time this session: assuming a working tree's disabled-mechanism state matched HEAD's actual committed behavior, when it didn't.
2026-08-24Started doing texel eval tuning.Scott Gasch