Chess Engine: Ceres 0.87
Release notes for Ceres 0.87
Previous versions of Ceres had serious difficulties winning won endgames when tablebases were enabled. This problem is now partially corrected (due to DTZ file support) but still needs more work. Therefore it is suggested to use reasonable adjudication rules when running tournaments.
The LC0.DLL used to access the Leela Chess Zero backend code has been updated. Although the prior version will continue to work with 0.87, it will not provide the best experience because it lacks tablebase DTZ support (for finding winning moves in tablebase endings).
The excellent Nibbler GUI interface is now supported due to newly supported UCI setoptions (MultiPV, LogLiveStats and UCI_ShowWDL).
A bug causing incorrect principal variation moves to be output to UCI clients is corrected.
The format of network specification strings (such as "LC0:703810") are now more flexible:
the "LC0:" can optionally be omitted
the network specification (such as "703810") can optionally instead be a complete file path (such as "c:\nn\weights2_703810.pb.gz")
The Ceres.json key "SyzygyPath" now can be used to set the tablebase directories (DirTablebases is retained for backward compatibility).
Optionally multiple semicolon-separated tablebase paths can be specified.
A subset of the setoption commands supported by Leela are now supported:
SmartPruningFactor (only supported for value 0)
SyzygyPath
CPUCT
CPUCTAtRoot
CPUCTBase
CPUCTBaseAtRoot
CPUCTFactor
CPUCTFactorAtRoot
PolicyTemperature
VerboseMoveStats
LogFile
MultiPV
These options (except MultiPV) are also supported in Ceres.json under the same name.
The LogFile option creates a log file containing detailed information about each search, including the verbose move statistics, a dump of the principal variation and associated statistics for each move, and information about the reason for the search termination.
In the special case of very small searches (e.g. < 1000 nodes), search speed was significantly improved.
Certain search and time management parameters were tuned further tuned.
Numerous small bugs and incompatibilities were corrected.
The file storage required for build, packaging and deployment is reduced dramatically (from about 500mb to 35mb) due to elimination of unused Nuget packages.
Play quality is believed improved, with magnitude of improvement varying widely depending on the network and time control, often falling in the 10 to 20+ Elo range.
Continuing improvements to code clarity, simplicity and documentation were made.
A binary installation package was created. Hopefully it should be possible to run Ceres directly from the unpacked files. Two subdirectories (CUDA_v11.1 and CUDA_v11.2) contain the required LC0.DLL file. Depending on the version of CUDA installed (11.1 or 11.2), one or the other of these files should be placed in the directory containing the Leela Chess Zero version 0.26.3 binaries (and specified in the Ceres.json file as "DirLC0Binaries"). Please note this binary distribution is experimental and not yet widely tested.
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