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redundant pawn-location bitboard
board_representation/EVAL.md: rewritten migration plan for a
bitboard-backed Eval() (mobility ray-walks + bvAttacks replacement),
plus a performance-philosophy section recording the profiling-first,
cut-aggressively-except-mobility/safety-awareness approach agreed on
this session, and findings on CountKingSafetyDefects' structural
inability to share bvAttacks-derived state with _EvalKing.
EVAL_TIME per-term instrumentation (chess.h/eval.c/root.c): breaks
the existing whole-Eval() cycle counter down by pawns/knight/bishop/
rook/queen/king, the always-paid pre-lazy-exit segment, and the
full-eval-only post-lazy segment, printed alongside the existing
"Avg. cpu cycles in eval" line. Diagnostic only (EVAL_TIME-gated),
no effect on the normal release profile.
Drop PAWN_HASH_ENTRY's bbPawnLocations[2]: it duplicated
POSITION's own incrementally-maintained bbPawns[2], rebuilt bit-by-bit
on every pawn-hash miss for no reason. eval.c now reads pos->bbPawns[]
directly; removed a stale per-iteration invariant assert in _EvalPawns
that only made sense when the bitboard was being built bit-by-bit in
that same loop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01P6g6iF6mD1Hau6nCZCzwYj
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bitboard helpers
- bitboard.c: CoorFromBitBoardRank1ToRank8 cleared the lowest set bit
unconditionally instead of the reported (highest) one, silently
mis-walking doubled-pawn files in eval.c's passed-pawn detection.
- search.c/searchsup.c: move GetLMRReduction's precondition checks from
inside the function to the caller in search.c (pre-existing work),
finishing the split with a matching gate in split.c's HelpSearch --
the parallel-search call site had no gate at all, letting it call
GetLMRReduction unconditionally (including for checking moves),
reachable only under real multithreading (--cpus > 1) and the
intermittent root cause of assertion crashes seen under --cpus 4.
- eval.c: redirect CountBits/CoorFromBitBoardRank8ToRank1/
CoorFromBitBoardRank1ToRank8 to inline compiler-builtin versions
(gated !CROUTINES) instead of the real out-of-line asm calls, on
eval.c's ~20 existing production call sites. CountBits' asm body
isn't O(1) popcnt, it's a Kernighan bit-clearing loop plus call
overhead, paid on every Eval() call.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Jntky4yGUTyQVaGCXms4F2
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Clean gmake GENETIC=1 PERF_COUNTERS=1 MP=1 SIXTYFOUR=1 build had 100
warnings; DEBUG=1 and TEST=1 builds had more once actually exercised.
- OFFSET_OF/CONTAINING_STRUCT (chess.h) and PTR_TO_ALLOC_HASH (unix.c)
truncated pointers through 32-bit ULONG before use in offset/hash
arithmetic on this 64-bit build -- routed through size_t instead.
- Diagnostic int<->void* round-trips (command.c, root.c, split.c,
sig.c, data.c, unix.c, util.c) widened/narrowed via size_t to avoid
implicit truncation.
- ABS_DIFF on unsigned COOR now casts to int before abs().
- Dropped -fexpensive-optimizations (GCC-only, clang silently ignores
it) from GNUmakefile.
- Removed genuinely dead variables (book.c, gamelist.c, split.c,
testgenerate.c, testhash.c).
- Guarded DEBUG/PERF_COUNTERS/_X86_-only variables and the
_CMEvidenceBucket helper under the #ifdef that actually reads them,
since ASSERT/EVAL_TERM/KEEP_TRACK_OF_FIRST_MOVE_FHs compile away
outside those builds.
- Added missing prototypes for SlidePawn, SlidePawnWithoutSigs,
SlidePieceWithoutSigs (move.c), previously undeclared in chess.h.
- Removed dead _SystemIsRoot (unix.c).
Verified via precommit_check.sh: TEST=1 self-test suite passes,
DEBUG=1 smoke test (10 random ECM positions, sd 4) passes with no
crashes/assertions, release build restored -- all three profiles now
build with zero warnings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014Cmv11sJZqVfanrPh6UnWE
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dispatch.
The per-square mobility ray-walk called through a function pointer for
every square visited (piece type varies square to square, so the CPU's
indirect-branch predictor couldn't learn it), and nearly every handler
reduced to a couple of constant increments and a stop/continue flag.
Replaced each PMOBILITY_HELPER table with a small case-tag table and an
inlined switch, dropping all now-dead handler functions and the
PMOBILITY_HELPER typedef. Also hoisted the ray-invariant rank/file
direction test (rook's "connected" bonus, queen's bishop/rook xray
cases) out of the per-square switch to compute once per ray instead.
Verified semantics-preserving: node counts, solve/fail sets, and PVs
are byte-for-byte identical to head_reference across all three curated
ECM suites (ringers/confident_quick/hard_quick) at sd 10. bench shows a
consistent ~6-7% NPS improvement over two back-to-back runs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012Q8wbZABsyG7PZQUd9WBAw
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Eval() already detects trapped/attacked pieces (for search hints via
RecordEnprisePieceAtPly/RecordTrappedPiece) but never penalized them in
the static score. Add two named, DNA-visible constants: a larger flag
for the opponent-to-move/imminently-capturable case, a smaller one for
the own-move/still-might-escape case -- flat "this is bad" nudges, not
an attempt to price the material outcome, which search still owns.
Verified flat on ecm_ringers/ecm_confident_quick vs head_reference at
sd 10; ecm_hard_quick's lone flip (ECM.370) is a search-instability
artifact of that specific position (its true evaluation was still
moving through depth 14 in independent runs), not a real regression.
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real king-safety bug found along the way.
A full-file pass over eval.c hunting for the "positional terms too
loud" feedback from real chess programmers, following the concrete
finding that Crafty prices most structural themes through one term
where this codebase spread the same theme across several (passed
pawns alone via 5-6 separate additive terms that can all fire for one
pawn). Two categories of fix, applied per the rule "if it's counting
the same thing twice, kill it; if it's a genuinely different angle on
the same theme, turn it down rather than remove it":
Pawns (pawn-hash cached, so free regardless of term count -- these are
data/magnitude fixes, not perf fixes):
- Removed ISOLATED_PAWN_PENALTY_BY_COUNT, a whole-position aggregate
that re-priced the same uIsolated[] count already reflected by
summing the per-pawn isolated term once per isolated pawn -- an
exact duplicate, not a different angle.
- CANDIDATE_PASSER_BY_RANK's "in endgame" bonus used to add the
exact same value a second time (a literal clone of the term just
added above it); now a /2 fractional modifier.
- CONNECTED_PASSERS_BY_RANK / SUPPORTED_PASSER_BY_RANK /
OUTSIDE_PASSER_BY_DISTANCE scaled to ~1/3 magnitude: each prices a
genuinely distinct angle on "how good is this passer" (connected
to a partner, pawn-defended, outside the opposing majority) and
can stack for the same pawn, so turned down rather than removed.
- ISOLATED_DOUBLED_PAWN turned down (-11 -> -5): a per-pawn kicker
that stacks with the whole-position DOUBLED_PAWN_PENALTY_BY_COUNT
aggregate for the isolated+doubled subset -- different angle
(single-worst-case flag vs. whole-position severity), not a
duplicate, but a real overlap worth trimming.
Pieces (non-cached, real per-node cost, so these are also legibility/
perf fixes, not just magnitude):
- Bishop: cut BISHOP_IN_CLOSED_POSITION outright -- it duplicated
bishop mobility rather than adding a distinct angle (mobility
already measures per-bishop diagonal blockage directly and more
precisely than a coarse whole-board proxy).
- Knight: killed a stale "don't block unmoved E2/D2 pawns" TODO
(opening-book territory, not eval's job) and "a knight with an
open file behind it is good" (dubious chess reasoning reusing an
unrelated table -- the same lookup as the backward-pawn-blockade
bonus, for a completely different concept).
- Rook: killed ROOK_TRAPPING_EKING (a rook on the 7th/8th aligned
with the enemy king is exactly the geometric pattern
CountKingSafetyDefects' CHECK_VECTOR scan already folds into
uPiecesPointingAtKing -- belongs in king safety, not a rook-
specific bolt-on). Also removed pFriendRook, dead in the same
block.
- Queen: killed "pointing near enemy K" (QUEEN_ATTACKS_SQ_NEXT_TO_
KING) -- computed from the queen's own mobility ray-cast, direct-
attacks only, duplicating what _EvalKing's real (non-lazy-estimate)
danger computation already reads from the identical attack-table
bits a few lines away.
- cTrapped fixed from a single COOR per color to a small [2][4] list
(_RecordTrappedCandidate): the old single-slot design let a later
piece's zero-mobility candidacy silently overwrite an earlier
one's on the same side, discarding a genuinely trapped-and-
attacked piece. This fed into search too (RecordTrappedPiece's
move-ordering hint), not just eval scoring. RecordTrappedPiece's
own per-ply single slot is left alone per design (would double the
cost on the branch that already computes it, this is the
innermost eval loop) -- now reports the MOST VALUABLE of the
candidates found, not just whichever was found last.
King (the actual regression-and-recovery of this session):
- Cutting the queen's "pointing near enemy K" term initially cost
real solves (117->110 on the sd10 curated suites) despite being a
correct duplication kill -- the general king-safety loop's
per-square attacker accounting was piece-type-blind (a queen
attacking a square near the king counted the same as a knight
doing the same geometric thing), so removing the one place that
priced queen-specific severity lost real fidelity, not just a
duplicate. Fixed properly: added KING_QUEEN_PROXIMITY_DANGER,
computed from bvAttacks[...].small.uQueen / .xray.uQueen bits the
king-safety loop already reads for every one of its 11 squares --
free (no new attack-table work) and more accurate than the killed
term (catches x-ray/latent queen threats it never did). Calibrated
against the killed term's own empirical magnitude (uNearKing * 8,
capped at 6) rather than guessed. Recovered to 118/191 (a new
session-best), now with the fidelity gap actually closed instead
of just removed.
- KING_SUPPORTING_OWN_PASSER_BY_RANK split out from
SUPPORTED_PASSER_BY_RANK, which _EvalKing's "kings in front of
passers" endgame bonus was silently reusing -- pawn-support and
king-escort are different concepts (fires when the KING stands
next to its own passer, not when a pawn does); scaling the shared
table down for its real purpose was silently also scaling the
unrelated king-escort bonus. Seeded with the table's original
(pre-scaling) hand-tuned magnitude.
- Collapsed three copy-pasted file-scan blocks (c-1/c/c+1, identical
logic repeated three times) into one loop -- confirmed
behaviorally neutral by isolated sd10 suite testing before
landing alongside the king-safety content changes.
Net result across the three curated suites (sd10, vs. the hand-tuned+
bugfix baseline this built on): 117 -> 118, a new session best, with
every intermediate checkpoint tested via EVAL_DUMP verification +
precommit_check.sh + sd10 sweep before moving to the next change.
Deliberately deferred, written down for a future session rather than
attempted here: a holistic king-safety overhaul (the piece-type-
tropism inconsistency across knight/bishop/queen/the general
CountKingSafetyDefects scan goes deeper than tonight's scoped fixes),
recalibrating EstimatePositionalScore's iKingSwingP90 lazy-eval margin
table (the instrumentation that built it no longer exists in this
tree, and today's changes have already shifted the true swing
distribution it was calibrated against), and training a small king-
danger classifier from TWIC checkmate games (snapshot king safety
features at -10/-15 moves from real checkmates, not resignations) to
calibrate whichever of the above happens first.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01M9ZDiJhiUajUxh95mTXCFJ
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a stale king-safety data bug found along the way.
The Texel/coordinate-descent auto-tuning pass (started at 29d73f4) left
several eval terms with non-monotonic or outright sign-flipped values
that several ASSERTs had to be silently commented out to tolerate
(e.g. BACKWARD_SHIELDED_BY_LOCATION scoring a structural pawn defect as
a +12..+17 bonus on most squares, PASSER_BONUS_AS_MATERIAL_COMES_OFF
staying flat until the defending side was down to almost nothing).
Restored all 54 differing constant tables to their last hand-tuned
values (commit df8facc, pre-dating 29d73f4) mechanically -- table
names/shapes are identical between the two commits, only values
differ, so this is a pure data restore with none of the surrounding
code-structure changes since df8facc reverted.
Also fixes a real bug found while investigating: pos->uPiecesPointingAtKing[]
was only refreshed inside EstimatePositionalScore's lazy-eval-margin
path (eval.c ~5648), but _EvalKing reads it unconditionally on every
full eval. Whenever a node's cheap material+pawn score wasn't close
enough to the alpha/beta window to trigger that lazy-margin branch, the
full eval proceeded straight to _EvalKing using a stale
uPiecesPointingAtKing value left over from a prior, unrelated node --
silent, intermittent noise in king-safety scoring on an unpredictable
subset of evaluations. Introduced 2026-08-24/26 (29d73f4, 7857096), so
it predates and was baked into the Texel tuning pass being reverted
here. Fixed by computing it once in an else branch when the lazy-margin
path isn't taken, so it's refreshed exactly once per full eval either
way (this is the innermost eval loop, so avoided doubling the cost on
the branch that already computes it).
sd10/sn5m results across the three curated suites (vs. head_reference,
the prior Texel-tuned HEAD):
sd10: ringers 9/11 (was 10), confident 85/90 (was 88), hard 23/90 (was 17) -- total 117 vs 115
sn5m: ringers 11/11 (was 10), confident 87/90 (was 89), hard 14/90 (was 13) -- total 112 vs 112
Net win at sd10, wash at sn5m, in both cases with a large swing toward
ecm_hard_quick -- consistent with hand-tuned values being more
internally coherent (monotonic curves, no sign flips, no double-counted
whole-position aggregates layered on top of already-summed per-item
terms) even though they were never retuned against this specific suite
or these specific opponents.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01M9ZDiJhiUajUxh95mTXCFJ
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Finishes work left half-done in 7857096 ("Replace ctx->uPositional with
a data-calibrated Eval() return value"): that commit added Eval()'s new
piPositional out-param but never migrated GetRoughEvalScore onto it, so
GetRoughEvalScore's mid/deep-tree fallback kept reading the old
ctx->uPositional field -- a per-thread EWMA written only on full-eval
calls and never touched by the (far more common) lazy-eval path, so it
carried a stale value from whatever unrelated position last triggered a
full eval, potentially many nodes/plies away. Combined with EVAL_HASH
being long since disabled (its probe branch already dead), every
GetRoughEvalScore call past ply 4 was effectively "material + garbage."
Fixed by having GetRoughEvalScore just call Eval() directly -- its own
lazy-exit machinery already is the cheap, calibrated estimate this
function exists to provide, so there's no separate estimator to
maintain. Removed ctx->uPositional entirely (struct field, its EWMA
update in eval.c, both root.c init sites, split.c's cross-split
propagation, testeval.c's reset) along with the entire EVAL_HASH
subsystem (struct, table, Probe/StoreEvalHash, main.c's now-dead
reporting branch, the GNUmakefile flag) -- confirmed unused elsewhere
and explicitly being cut for good, not coming back in this form.
Also fixed GetRoughEvalScore's prototype being wrongly declared inside
#ifdef EVAL_HASH in chess.h even though the function itself is defined
and called unconditionally -- this was the source of the recurring
"call to undeclared function 'GetRoughEvalScore'" implicit-declaration
warning seen throughout this session's builds.
Separately, fixed QSearch to match its own documented intent: the
en-prise/trapped-piece "don't let this side stand pat" check now only
fires if the side hasn't already been allowed to stand pat earlier in
this qsearch line (matching the comment above it, which already said
this but the code never implemented it).
Verified against baseline/typhoon_baseline (pristine, pre-session) on
ecm_ringers.ep_ (4), ecm_hard_quick.ep_ (50-sample), and
ecm_confident_quick.ep_ (40) at sn=5M, --cpus 1, book disabled:
pristine baseline solves 3/50 on the hard sample; this commit solves
6/50, with the stand-pat fix and GetRoughEvalScore fix each
contributing +1 independently confirmed. No regressions on the other
two suites (4/4 and 40/40 unchanged throughout).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YGSMkwjqiCk4XhbfN7ugD2
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EBF/beta-cutoff/counter-move stats, script.c FPE fix.
No LMR, no counter-move-driven move ordering (both explored separately,
kept out for now -- counter-move measured worse, ~655->647 solved on
ecm879 @ sn=4M with a leaner tree beforehand). Futility pruning restored.
Verified: 647/879 solved, EBF 4.609 @ sn=4M; 684/879 solved, EBF 3.995
@ 20s/move, 1cpu, 256m hash (typhoon_baseline.log).
The counter-move table is still written and its stats still tracked
(dynamic.c) for diagnostic purposes, but generate.c no longer reads it
for move ordering, so it has no effect on search behavior in this
commit.
lmr_testing/ holds the in-flight graded-LMR + counter-move code (not
applied here) with notes on what was already tried and measured, so a
future session can resume without re-deriving it.
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uPositional was a per-thread EWMA of abs(material - true score) used to
size lazy-eval and futility margins. It was history-derived (reflecting
whatever recent, unrelated positions looked like) rather than derived
from the position actually being margined, and its update/consumption
was tangled with EVAL_HASH (now disabled).
Eval() now takes an optional SCORE *piPositional out-param and fills it
in on every return path: exact (abs(material-delta)) on a full eval,
or an estimate from a new EstimatePositionalScore() on a lazy exit.
EstimatePositionalScore()'s two terms (king-safety-defect-bucketed, and
a flat residual for mobility/passers/everything else) are calibrated
from ~1.6M measured full-eval samples (p90 of the actual swing), not
guessed -- an initial guessed version measurably regressed ECM solve
rate (630 vs a 650 baseline at sn=4M); the recalibrated version is back
at parity (649/879).
search.c's qsearch futility now reads the value Eval() just computed
instead of the stale/shared ctx field. Also removes QSearchInDangerNoStandPat
and SideCanStandPat, dead since the danger-hash check that fed them was
already commented out (e08387a) -- they depended on the same enprise/
trapped-piece data this conversation is about to move off of
g_PositionHash entirely.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
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it found)
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