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============================== My email: jotes@go2.pl



Chess engine: Winter 0.9

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Winter is a chess engine that relies on the UCI protocol to communicate with a GUI.

 Contributors: Jonathan Rosenthal, Jonathan Maurer, Jonas Kuratli.
Rating JCER=2946 

The newest version of Winter is using the same evaluation function as in the previous release. The following changes have however occured:

WDL Search: WDL probabilities are now used in the whole search. Previously the WDL scores were transformed into scalar values for search purposes. This means Winter now outputs wdl estimates.
Support for UCI_ShowWDL uci option.
Support for Hash full UCI output.
Fixed Time, Node and Depth Searches should no longer return instantly in positions with only one legal move.
PV outputs are no longer restricted by the current depth.
PV outputs are restricted in the case of draws.
Winter has joined OpenBench. As a corollary, this means Winter has support for the bench command. A big thank you to Noobpwnftw who graciously donates the majority of resources to OpenBench, to Andrew Grant for writing OpenBench, to the SF dev team who made the original Fishtest and all the other great people working on or donating resources to OpenBench.
Various changes to the search. In general Winter is now more agressive in its pruning, especially in PV nodes.
Speed improvements, especially when compiled with GCC. The release binaries should still be significantly faster than in the previous release.
Time management has been improved. This is true for both repeating TC and TC with increment, but moreso in the case of increment. The time management is also easier to understand, in case someone would like to steal ideas.
Contempt and Armageddon had a minor rework. The functionality should be comparable to in Winter 0.8, but thanks to the new WDL Search it is easier to invert the effect of contempt. This means that cp and wdl score outputs are based on something close to the eval without contempt. That being said, the inverse does not work with contempt set to 100/-100. Armageddon default is 60/-60 for white and black respectively.
The binaries released should correspond to the same settings as during the previous release, so whichever version worked best for you then is likely still the best. That being said, due to the speed improvements, they likely no longer make much sense. It is likely the 1.0 release (which I intend to be the next big one) will have other binary versions.
Winter 0.9 - download

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