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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
12 daysFix _ShouldWeConsiderThisMove's SEE-purity bug and ComputeMoveScore'sScott Gasch
killer-mate edge case; fix PV-display cycle hang. _ShouldWeConsiderThisMove (QSearch's move-consider gate) read the raw, move-ordering-biased mvf[].iValue directly instead of going through ComputeMoveScore, so it inherited the same +120-ish flat bias (plus small MVV-LVA nudges) on winning/even captures that ComputeMoveScore was already fixed to strip out. Fixed via the same MOVE_SCORE_ORDERING_BIAS subtraction, now factored into a shared chess.h macro. Restoring the old effective leniency required an explicit QSEARCH_CONSIDER_MARGIN (120, A/B'd against 0/60/120 on ecm_ringers/confident_quick/hard_quick) rather than assuming the bug's magnitude was itself a meaningful margin -- net effect vs the pre-fix baseline is -2 solves on hard_quick, accepted as the cost of correctness (see lmr_testing/RESULTS.md for the full sweep). ComputeMoveScore separately mishandled quiet killer-mate moves: they can reach SORT_THESE_FIRST via generate.c's killer-mate bonus (unrelated to the capture-bias path), so the bias-subtraction was wrongly applied to a move that never had that bias. Gated the subtraction on IS_CAPTURE_OR_PROMOTION(mv); quiet moves (including killer-mate ones) now correctly collapse to 0, per the function's contract of estimating a move's value on the 100=1-pawn axis. Measured as a no-op on all three suites -- rare in practice, but a real correctness fix. Left a comment documenting two candidate refinements for scoring quiet moves as non-uniform future work, deliberately not implemented (each needs its own isolated test). FinishPVTailFromHash (cosmetic PV-display hash-walk, used only for printing) had no cycle detection, so a drawish/repeating position could spin until the output buffer filled instead of terminating naturally. Added visited-position-signature tracking and a <REP> marker. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YGSMkwjqiCk4XhbfN7ugD2
13 daysFix QSearch stand-pat gating bug and ComputeMoveScore's SEE contamination; ↵Scott Gasch
tune singular-reply-to-check margin. QSearch stand-pat: the "deny stand pat when material is genuinely in trouble" check was gated on fCouldStandPat (has this side had a chance to stand pat earlier in this qsearch line). That's wrong -- whether an ancestor node had a moment of safety says nothing about whether *this* node's material danger is real; a hanging piece doesn't stop hanging because the position was quiet three plies ago. fCouldStandPat's legitimate uses (search.c:950, 1190/1193) are about deciding whether a *whole line* looks forcing enough to justify extra qsearch depth/ breadth, a different question from per-node stand-pat correctness. Removed the gate; the material-in-trouble check now always denies stand-pat, regardless of history. ComputeMoveScore: for winning/even captures and promotions, the value extracted from the move-ordering sort key (generate.c's _ScoreAllMoves) included a flat +120 ordering bias plus small MVV-LVA tie-break nudges (PIECE_VALUE_OVER_100 terms) baked in on top of the real SEE/ material-diff value. Harmless for its original sorting purpose (every capture gets the same treatment), but this function's callers (futility pruning, the singular-reply-to-check extension) use the result as an eval-axis quantity compared against material-scale margins -- the contamination doesn't belong there. Subtracted the ordering-only bias back out to recover pure SEE/material-diff, same axis as the raw PIECE_VALUE() fallback used when no move-stack index is available. Quiet-move and losing-capture handling were already correct (both collapse to a clean, uncontaminated value). Also bumped the singular-reply-to-check margin (225 -> 400): confirmed via direct A/B on the quick suites that this is a real, independent improvement on top of the SEE fix, not just compensating for it -- reverting to 225 measurably regressed both ecm_confident_quick.ep_ (89->88/90) and ecm_hard_quick.ep_ (10->6/90) versus keeping 400. Verified against pristine baseline (no LMR in this binary) on the three-suite protocol (ecm_ringers.ep_, ecm_confident_quick.ep_, ecm_hard_quick.ep_, sn=5M, book disabled): 11/11 ringers (matches baseline exactly), 89/90 confident (vs baseline's 90/90), 10/90 hard (vs baseline's 4/90) -- a real net improvement over baseline with zero LMR involved, considerably stronger than any state reached earlier in this session's LMR-only experimentation. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YGSMkwjqiCk4XhbfN7ugD2
13 daysRemove ctx->uPositional and the EVAL_HASH subsystem; fix GetRoughEvalScore.Scott Gasch
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
13 daysFix integer divide-by-zero in script.c's post-suite histogram printer.Scott Gasch
uMax (the largest histogram bucket count) can be 0 when a script run's positions are all unsolved -- ASSERT(uMax > 0) doesn't stop this in a non-DEBUG build, and the following loop unconditionally divides by uMax, crashing with SIGFPE. Hit repeatedly today running single-position diagnostic scripts (an isolated unsolved position naturally has an all-zero histogram) while investigating an LMR regression on ECM.213. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YGSMkwjqiCk4XhbfN7ugD2
13 daysBaseline: uPositional data-calibrated fix, enprise/trapped hints, ↵Scott Gasch
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.
2026-08-26Replace ctx->uPositional with a data-calibrated Eval() return value.Scott Gasch
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]>
2026-08-26Don't [re-]consult the SEE when generator already just did so.Scott Gasch
2026-08-26Make EVAL_HASH optional.Scott Gasch
2026-08-26Segfault fix.Scott Gasch
2026-08-26Disable qsearch danger-detection (SideCanStandPat) as an experimentScott Gasch
Profiling (pmcstat, sampled) showed SideCanStandPat as the single hottest leaf function in the engine, ahead of Eval itself -- not from expensive logic (it's a 3-line signature/lock/lookup), but from sheer call volume (~95% of the tree is qsearch) combined with a likely-cold 16MB global hash table probe and an uncontended-but-nonzero lock/unlock pair paid on every call even single-threaded. Disabling it entirely: real bench nps was flat (~1.53M vs ~1.57M, within noise -- the earlier "1.2M->1.75M" bench reading was itself an uncontrolled, noisy single comparison on this shared box, not a real effect). But ECM (sn 4M) came back at 655/879, the best result of the whole session (vs 650 baseline) -- suggests the danger-detection heuristic may have been net-negative for search quality on balance, forcing exhaustive no-stand-pat search in some positions where standing pat was actually fine. Speed claim didn't hold up; the tactical-quality result is a genuine, unexpected positive worth investigating further. Not yet validated in self-play -- pending a clean match run. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-25Tame check-extension compounding; verified neutral in self-play (0.4955)Scott Gasch
Fixes a real pathology: checks along a long unbroken forcing line could extend for free (net zero cost against the qsearch boundary), letting tree size blow up multiple orders of magnitude on positions like a near-all-check forced mate (ECM.089: 4.5B nodes / 31min at depth 12 before this change). - Main-search check extension: gate on SEE soundness (a losing sacrifice check gets a small consolation QUARTER_PLY instead of the full bonus a sound check gets), and flatten the sound-check bonus to a flat THREE_QUARTERS_PLY instead of a near-free ONE_PLY. - Lower the qsearch entry threshold to match (THREE_QUARTERS_PLY instead of ONE_PLY) so a lone check still buys one extra full-width ply as before; root.c trims QUARTER_PLY off the per-iteration depth budget so this doesn't add a blanket 1/4 ply to every search. - Qsearch's own check-widening (QSearchFromCheckNoStandPat) now relies on fCouldStandPat history plus a g_uIterateDepth/4 ceiling instead of an unconditional per-check grant, and QPLIES_OF_NON_CAPTURE_CHECKS moved from 1 to 2 to cover both "enter qsearch already in check" and "opponent's reply is the first real check" cases with one baseline window instead of ad hoc attacker-color tracking. Net effect on ECM.089 (sn 4M canary): ~7.5x fewer nodes and ~4x less time at depth 12 versus the original, unbounded behavior. Costs solve count on the full ECM suite (879 pos, sn 4M): 650 baseline -> 636 here -- expected and accepted, since ECM is unusually check-extension-heavy tactics and not representative of real games. Self-play vs baseline (1000 games, st 1) came back at B_SCORE=0.4955, ELO=-3.1+/-21.5 -- statistically neutral, confirming the fix costs nothing in real play. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-25Add LMR with PV-adjacency guard (v7), verified against saved binaryScott Gasch
Late Move Reductions using a depth x movecount table (Ethereal-style formula), gated off PV nodes and the ply directly below a PV node (PLY_INFO.fIsPVNode), with magnitude-aware re-search on fail-high. Verified node-for-node identical to the previously tested-good v7 binary on a canary position (sd 10) after reconstructing from a ZFS snapshot of search.c/root.c/split.c taken just before that binary was built. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-24Started doing texel eval tuning.Scott Gasch
2026-08-23Integrate new syzygy egtb code, lose the old Nalimov code.Scott Gasch
2026-08-23Clean X64 build and ported GetAttacks to x64.Scott Gasch
2026-08-22Bug fixes.Scott Gasch
2026-08-18Stop hanging on exit!Scott Gasch
2018-10-03Update codebase to remove clang warnings (and a couple of legit errorsScott Gasch
it found)
2016-06-01Initial checkin for typhoon chess engine.Scott Gasch