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11 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 daysFix IID's killer-blind gate and its ordering-flag/history contaminationScott Gasch
of iValue; harden against a latent ComputeMoveExtension bug. DO_IID's "is the top move crappy" gate compared raw iValue against SORT_THESE_FIRST only, missing that ordinary killer moves (FIRST_KILLER through FOURTH_KILLER) sit below that threshold too -- a killer that already proved itself elsewhere in the tree was being treated as "crappy" and triggering an unnecessary shallow rescore. Fixed by also excluding killer-flagged moves from the gate. RescoreMovesViaSearch corrupted the winning move's real search score by OR-ing in SORT_THESE_FIRST to force it to sort first (`mvf[uBest].iValue |= SORT_THESE_FIRST`) -- unnecessary (SelectBest{With,No}History already find the true max by plain magnitude comparison, no flag needed) and actively dangerous: a later ComputeMoveScore() call on that same move, if it's a capture, would see the corrupted value, mistake it for generate.c's biased-capture-ordering format, and subtract the wrong bias entirely. Removed the OR; added an explicit PLY_INFO.fMovesRescoredByIID flag so ComputeMoveScore and the main search-loop's move-selection call can both recognize "this ply's iValue holds a real eval-axis score" without relying on bit-pattern inference. Consequently, ComputeMoveScore now trusts an IID-rescored move's score outright instead of running it through the capture-bias-subtraction or quiet-move-collapse-to-0 logic (both of which assume generate.c's ordering encoding, which a rescored ply no longer holds). Separately hardened it against quiet killer-mate moves, which can reach SORT_THESE_FIRST via a different, capture-unrelated path and were incorrectly getting the capture bias subtracted from them; they now correctly collapse to 0 like other quiet moves. Two follow-on ideas -- blending history into the real IID score (scaled or capped) and a exact-tie-only history tiebreak -- were implemented, measured, and rejected: blending invents a new, leak-prone move-scoring axis for no measured benefit, and the tiebreak-only compromise still cost solves relative to just trusting the real score outright. Main search's move-selection call now branches once per selection (not once per candidate move) between SelectBestNoHistory (IID-rescored plies) and SelectBestWithHistory (everyone else), keeping the overwhelmingly common non-rescored path at zero added cost. Net measured effect (ecm_ringers.ep_/ecm_confident_quick.ep_/ ecm_hard_quick.ep_, sn=5M): 10/90/9, down from a pre-existing 11/88/10 on ringers and hard specifically -- see lmr_testing/RESULTS.md for the full sweep of rejected alternatives and why the regression was accepted as the cost of removing a latent, leak-prone bug class rather than chasing the exact prior numbers. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YGSMkwjqiCk4XhbfN7ugD2
2016-06-01Initial checkin for typhoon chess engine.Scott Gasch