I would love to do "The King" but I don't know if it is freely available or where to get it.
Any other suggestions?
There is a Crafty 25.3 – it fixed some bug and I think it introduced the syzygy tablebases (but this could have also been in a previous version). It is „bug-free“ as far as I can judge. Crafty would be incredibly interesting for me as proof of concept. It is one of the completely unique engines evaluation-wise. There are some queen-less middlegames where Crafty really shines, but except Bob +everyone+ would agree that its evaluation has been a hopeless case for ages. But Crafty is still a +pretty+ decent engine even now nevertheless. If its NNUE version would improve significantly: I would just +love+ to see it. So my vote is Crafty!! I would even donate some money for this project if this helps.
I would love to do "The King" but I don't know if it is freely available or where to get it.
Any other suggestions?
There is a Crafty 25.3 – it fixed some bug and I think it introduced the syzygy tablebases (but this could have also been in a previous version). It is „bug-free“ as far as I can judge. Crafty would be incredibly interesting for me as proof of concept. It is one of the completely unique engines evaluation-wise. There are some queen-less middlegames where Crafty really shines, but except Bob +everyone+ would agree that its evaluation has been a hopeless case for ages. But Crafty is still a +pretty+ decent engine even now nevertheless. If its NNUE version would improve significantly: I would just +love+ to see it. So my vote is Crafty!! I would even donate some money for this project if this helps.
Peter
Regarding playing style my favorite definitely is Gandalf but Crafty is most interesting because what you already mentioned, excellent search but not so good evaluation. Rodent (good eval) with a relative small net still gained 300 elo and so for the sake of some better understanding of NNUE evaluation it would be most interesting if Crafty also would gain 300 elo.
Peter, I am not very familiar with Crafty, can you post the crafty.rc settings that suppresses all the debug info? And possibly where I can download the last version.
Subject: Re: Which NNUE development is next? Tue Apr 12, 2022 7:06 am
A Gandalf with NNUE would be very interesting for me, I'm a fan of the way Gandalf plays. Is there still contact with the Gandalf team ? I saw that the book and co-author Dan Wulff can be found on Facebook.
Subject: Re: Which NNUE development is next? Tue Apr 12, 2022 11:42 am
Here is my list of possible engines:
Open Source: ========== - Protector (I liked v1.3.6ish the most, because it was quite decent in handling closed/semiclosed positions; the current version is 1.9.0) - Stockfish (1.6.3 +- , yes I know - not SF again! However, I found the endgame play really good) - Texel
Non-Open-Source (as far as I know) - mostly for sentimental reasons: ==================================================== - Anmon 5.75 - Zappa II Mexico - Bright || Spark (I remember Bright playing the line in the accepted Spanish with 1... Bg4 2. h3 h5! with black) - Critter 0.9 - Hermann (it is ... a different engine - quite unique on its own)
SPQT and NNUE ============ I as far as I have understood, the nets are trained with positions evaluated by the engine (sorry, I am just a an enthusiast - no programmer). If this is true, does it make sense to train a net with a PSQT-only-engine, e.g. Rebel-PST or Pesto?
Subject: Re: Which NNUE development is next? Tue Apr 12, 2022 4:24 pm
Admin wrote:
I have Crafty 25.3 running with the following crafty.rc
Code:
ponder off hash=16m hashp=16m mt=1 log=off
It still produces log-files (despite log=off) and game-files.
Not very good for speed, but hopefully my SSD can handle all the unnecessary stuff.
I did a little research - supposedly there is even a kind of official 25.6 but no one ever managed to do windows compiles ( or provided them). So I stopped with 25.3 myself. As far as I recall your crafty.rc shouldn't work as intended in principle ( but the GUI will probably override the major variables as you want them anyway.).
I'll give mine that I use when running crafty in textmode to explain a few additional things you may or may not know:
Concerning the logfiles it should actually produce exactly +one+ little file game.001 and then stop doing any logging. It's been some time, but I think you may need the exit in the final line of your crafty.rc for this to work as intended.
Your ponder syntax is wrong, you need the = , but this probably gets overwritten by your GUI/adapter anyway.
You could consider to let it use egtb, syntax like in the above, Crafty isn't too good in dealing with complete paths, but it works like a charm if you use relative paths.
Concerning "computer" - Crafty used to do some asymetric evaluation against humans that was supposed to be super-clever but it never convinced me at all, so I always turned it off by force. XBoard/Winboard sends this to the engine when playing on a server when facing a computer account, but I don't think any over GUI does, so you might consider to add it to your crafty.rc.
resign=6 would let Crafty resign after 4 moves with eval<-6 , but I think this will be done by the GUI these days.
noise might make sense or not - it will supress engine output for some time. If you can't get it to stop with the logfiles, it might make sense for you to save space.
draw=accept lets Crafty accept and offer draws - dunno how this will work with your GUI of choice.
If you have any other questions regarding the setup please feel free to ask - I will probably be able to give some kind of sensible answer.
Subject: Re: Which NNUE development is next? Tue Apr 12, 2022 8:16 pm
Admin wrote:
Chris Whittington wrote:
Admin wrote:
Crafty runs fine, just finished the first one million games run. Added "computer". Changed "Ponder=off".
Are you going to stitch the resulting NNUE into Crafty?
That's the job for Bob himself, I am only creating a net based on Crafty eval.
The whole idea is if a Crafty net also gives ~300 elo like Rodent did under the same conditions.
I sincerely hope you do a little release of the result never-the-less. This would also be completely in accordance with the Crafty copyright rules that few people ever bothered to try to understand. You just have to get the credits as they should be and not enter it into competitions under your own name.
If I get things right this would be some Toga derivate with NNUE evals provided by Crafty. If this entity would be 300 points stronger than the original Crafty this would be amazing for me. Even if it were like 200 points stronger than Crafty actually, HCE may be a waste of time after all ( the few exceptions like KBNK don't matter ELO-wise).
I rarely log on and wander around here and did today: so I will give a warm good-bye to CTF and your attempt to save it here.
Subject: Re: Which NNUE development is next? Tue Apr 12, 2022 9:50 pm
I had also thought that this would be a Crafty with NNUE. I therefore doubt that Bob will actually use this NNUE. I don't think there will be a new Crafty.
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