Which NNUE development is next?

I have one PC free for the NNUE development of another existing engine, like I did for Rodent.

I am thinking of the following oldies:

1. Gandalf 7, CCRL rated 2644
2. Ruffian 2.1.0, CCRL rated 2623
3. Crafty 25.2, CCRL rated 2931

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?

I wonder if there is a large collection of MChess Computer games that could be used. The answer is more than likely No.

adminx wrote:

I wonder if there is a large collection of MChess Computer games that could be used. The answer is more than likely No.

If you have 5 million Mchess games the answer is yes

I vote for Gandalf 7. Of course, if you compile a SSE version.

matejst wrote:

I vote for Gandalf 7. Of course, if you compile a SSE version.

Yeah, Junior and Gambit Tiger also.

Admin wrote:

I have one PC free for the NNUE development of another existing engine, like I did for Rodent.

I am thinking of the following oldies:

1. Gandalf 7, CCRL rated 2644
2. Ruffian 2.1.0, CCRL rated 2623
3. Crafty 25.2, CCRL rated 2931

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

adminx wrote:

matejst wrote:

I vote for Gandalf 7. Of course, if you compile a SSE version.

Yeah, Junior and Gambit Tiger also.

As far as I know there never was an UCI version, only CB and Chesspartner native ones, I could be wrong.

I think that Christophe still makes a Tiger for phones. There was a Tiger 2007 UCI, if I remember well. I don't know about Gambit Tiger.

Ed,

do you plan to have an engine ready for Frank Quisinsky's next tournament? It is a very good way to test it at longer TC.

Peter Berger wrote:

Admin wrote:

I have one PC free for the NNUE development of another existing engine, like I did for Rodent.

I am thinking of the following oldies:

1. Gandalf 7, CCRL rated 2644
2. Ruffian 2.1.0, CCRL rated 2623
3. Crafty 25.2, CCRL rated 2931

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.

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.

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.

Alright, Gandalf will be next after Crafty.

I have tried Sargon but it is really too slow even at depth=3.

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?

Greetings,
Nils

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:

mt=2
tbpath=TB
egtb
hash=2048M
hashp=384M
ponder=on
time sd/120/10
log=off
computer
resign=6
draw=accept
noise 15
exit

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.

Peter

Crafty runs fine, just finished the first one million games run. Added "computer". Changed "Ponder=off".

Admin wrote:

Crafty runs fine, just finished the first one million games run. Added "computer". Changed "Ponder=off".

Cool- really looking forward to the results.

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?

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.

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.

Toga playing like crafty sounds like a minus minus.
All crafty had was its enormous search and heavy NPS while the playing style was ugly.

Mclane wrote:

Toga playing like crafty sounds like a minus minus.
All crafty had was its enormous search and heavy NPS while the playing style was ugly.

Really? From the top of my head I remember this game, you think this is ugly?

[Event "WCCC 2006"]
[Site "Turin, Italy"]
[Date "2006.05.30"]
[Round "8"]
[White "Diep"]
[Black "Crafty"]
[Result "0-1"]

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 exd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Be7 6.Bf4 O-O 7.Qd2 c6 8.O-O-O b5
9.f3 b4 10.Nce2 c5 11.Nb3 Nc6 12.Bxd6 c4 13.Nc5 Qa5 14.Bxe7 Nxe7 15.Qd6 Nf5
16.exf5 Qxa2 17.g4 a5 18.Rd4 Re8 19.Kd1 Qxb2 20.Nc1 b3 21.cxb3 cxb3 22.Bd3 a4
23.Re1 Rxe1+ 24.Kxe1 Qxc1+ 25.Ke2 Bb7 26.Qd8+ Ne8 27.Qe7 Bc6 28.Bc4 Nf6 29.Bxf7+
Kh8 30.Nd3 b2 31.Rd8+ Rxd8 32.Qxd8+ Be8 33.Bxe8 Qc2+ 34.Ke3 Nd5+ 35.Kd4 Qc3+
36.Ke4 Qc7 37.Qxc7 Nxc7 38.Nxb2 a3 39.Bf7 axb2 40.Ba2 Nb5 41.Kd3 Na3 42.g5 b1=B+
43.Bxb1 Nxb1 44.h4 Kg8 45.h5 Kf8 46.f4 Ke7 47.Kd4 Nd2 48.Ke3 Nc4+ 49.Kd4 Nd6
50.Ke5 Nf7+ 51.Kd5 h6 52.f6+ gxf6 53.g6 Nd8 54.f5 Nb7 55.Kc6 Na5+ 0-1

All the games against Junior were pretty nice, too. It may not be your cup of tea, but ugly, really?

[pgn][Event "WCCC 2006"]
[Site "Turin, Italy"]
[Date "2006.05.30"]
[Round "8"]
[White "Diep"]
[Black "Crafty"]
[Result "0-1"]

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 exd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Be7 6.Bf4 O-O 7.Qd2 c6 8.O-O-O b5
9.f3 b4 10.Nce2 c5 11.Nb3 Nc6 12.Bxd6 c4 13.Nc5 Qa5 14.Bxe7 Nxe7 15.Qd6 Nf5
16.exf5 Qxa2 17.g4 a5 18.Rd4 Re8 19.Kd1 Qxb2 20.Nc1 b3 21.cxb3 cxb3 22.Bd3 a4
23.Re1 Rxe1+ 24.Kxe1 Qxc1+ 25.Ke2 Bb7 26.Qd8+ Ne8 27.Qe7 Bc6 28.Bc4 Nf6 29.Bxf7+
Kh8 30.Nd3 b2 31.Rd8+ Rxd8 32.Qxd8+ Be8 33.Bxe8 Qc2+ 34.Ke3 Nd5+ 35.Kd4 Qc3+
36.Ke4 Qc7 37.Qxc7 Nxc7 38.Nxb2 a3 39.Bf7 axb2 40.Ba2 Nb5 41.Kd3 Na3 42.g5 b1=B+
43.Bxb1 Nxb1 44.h4 Kg8 45.h5 Kf8 46.f4 Ke7 47.Kd4 Nd2 48.Ke3 Nc4+ 49.Kd4 Nd6
50.Ke5 Nf7+ 51.Kd5 h6 52.f6+ gxf6 53.g6 Nd8 54.f5 Nb7 55.Kc6 Na5+ 0-1[/pgn]

Nice game indeed.

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.

Peter Berger wrote:

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.

It surely will give elo, also a release.

[quote="Admin"]I have one PC free for the NNUE development of another existing engine, like I did for Rodent.

I am thinking of the following oldies:

1. Gandalf 7, CCRL rated 2644
2. Ruffian 2.1.0, CCRL rated 2623
3. Crafty 25.2, CCRL rated 2931

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?


With out doubts: Gulll. Open source
Murka: open source