CCRL Discussion Board

Thanks
Looking forward to the results.

Hi everyone, thank you for the tests! I updated, the readme of the project with the latest results. Two days ago, I released the new Velvet v7.0.0: https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess/releases/tag/v7.0.0 The estimated strength increase is around 65 Elo. Additional details can be found in the rel...

Hi everyone,

today I released Velvet v6.0.0:
https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess ... tag/v6.0.0

Estimated strength increase is around 35 Elo in standard chess.
Details can be found in the release notes.

Best regards
Martin

Hello Ryan, thanks a lot for your message! It's great to hear, that you find my chess engine interesting. Even though it started as a small hobby project, it's nice to know it's also helpful for chess players to analyze their own games. But, the initial motivation for creating this engine wasn't rea...

Thanks a lot for the tests!

Hi everyone,

today I released Velvet v5.2.0:
https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess ... tag/v5.2.0

Estimated strength increase is around 40 Elo in standard chess and 60 Elo in FRC.
Details can be found in the release notes.

Best regards
Martin

If there is anything I can do differently to make some versions of Velvet work, I would appreciate knowing. Thanks! Hi Darius, sorry for the late reply. I just saw your post by chance today. Thanks a lot for your kind words and the interesting blog post about Velvet! The issue is related to a compi...

Velvet 4.0.0 64-bit 4CPU Gauntlet started in http://tlcv.net/16062 Thank you :thumbup: I also published a new release v4.1.0 today for the upcoming TCEC season. It can be downloaded from the GitHub releases page: https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess/releases/tag/v4.1.0 The automated build jobs n...

Hi everyone, today I released Velvet v4.0.0: https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess/releases/tag/v4.0.0 The main strength increase is for the FRC mode (around 100 self-play Elo). But also regular chess was improved by around 40 Elo (in self-play). Unfortunately, this time I did not have the time to...

Thanks again for testing

Hi everyone, I just released the new Velvet v3.2.0 with an estimated strength increase of 130 Elo. I fixed a bug in the neural network trainer, which allowed me to train a bigger and stronger net. The release also contains some performance improvements related to the neural network evaluation. The n...

Hi,

I just released a new minor release v3.1.0.
It provides pondering support and a strength increase of around 50 Elo.

The new release is available here: https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess ... tag/v3.1.0

Best regards,
Martin

Thanks again for testing
I just saw the updated CCRL Blitz results. 3058 Elo!
Two years ago, when I started again with chess programming, 3000 Elo seemed to be really far away.

Hi everyone, I just released the new Velvet v3.0.0, which now supports multi-threaded search. I also implemented some search improvements and optimizations and trained a new neural network using self-play games from Velvet v2 and pre-release versions of v3. From my tests I estimate an Elo improvemen...

Hi everyone, it's been a while since the last version. In the meantime I have experimented with machine learning and the use of a neural network for chess evaluation. For this I created two new tools, both written in Rust, to extract and label chess positions from Velvet self-play games and a traine...

Hello everyone, yesterday I released Velvet v1.2.0. The change log and executables for Windows and Linux can be found here: https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess/releases/tag/v1.2.0 The estimated strength, mostly based upon self-play results against the previous version, is around 2750 Elo. Best r...

I just noticed that the new version has already been tested for the latest CCRL update. Thanks a lot :D And the Elo improvement is even higher than expected! For my estimation I measure the Elo difference in matches against the previous version and divide it by 2. Usually this works quite well, but ...

Hi everyone, yesterday I released a new version of Velvet (v1.1.0) https://github.com/mhonert/velvet-chess/releases/tag/v1.1.0 Changes Simplified and improved passed pawn evaluation Replaced null-move pruning with a null-move reduction approach Increased (theoretical) maximum search depth Replaced c...

A pity I did not know this earlier. I have just tested Wasabi 1.5.0 and was about to play some more games with it in order to narrow its error margins. Now I think I'll change my mind and test Velvet instead. Sorry, I did not expect to finish the first version of Velvet so soon. Thanks, Martin. A n...

Hi everyone, I developed a new chess engine based upon my previous engine Wasabi. It should have similar playing strength, but offers a couple improvements: Windows 7 support Native executables (i.e. easy to configure in chess GUIs) Support for stopping ongoing searches (go infinite ... stop) Logs m...

Hi everyone, I've released another version of Wasabi. For this version I created a new tuning tool to tune all evaluation parameters and to improve the existing mobility and king safety evaluations. The new release is available here: https://github.com/mhonert/chess/releases/tag/v1.5.0 Best regards,...

Hi Gabor, thanks again for taking the time to test my engine

In the meantime I've been working on a new version, which seems to be in the 2500+ ELO range now!
I'll write an announcement shortly.

Hi everyone, I've just released a new version of Wasabi. It contains many small improvements, but the biggest ELO gain comes from the addition of mobility considerations to the evaluation function. The new release is available here: https://github.com/mhonert/chess/releases/tag/v1.4.0 It would be gr...

That's a pity.
Unfortunately this is a limitation of the WASM runtime itself.
There is an alternative runtime which supports Windows 7, but it's slower and would lose some ELO points.
Perhaps I will find a good solution before the next tournament series.

I've just seen the results - almost +80 ELO points!
Thanks again for testing!