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



Chess engine: Willow 3.0 NNUE (Windows and Linux)

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Willow - UCI engines   Rating CEDR=2941
A chess engine I am currently working on, written in C (WORK IN PROGRESS)
Compiled in Windows, works on BanksiaGUI with limited UCI support right now.

v.3.0:
Estimated CCRL Elo: 3250

Willow 3.0 is here, and it's biggest feature by far is NNUE! Three separate nets were trained, all on self-play games featuring intentional errors and random moves.

Net 1: 75m games, 762x64 net arch. Gained 100 elo over HCE willow in a STC SPRT.

Net 2: 125m games, 762x128 net arch. Gained 150 elo over net 1 in an STC SPRT.

Net 3: 170m games, 762x192 net arch. Gained 80 elo over net 2 in an STC SPRT.

The result is an engine that is both aggressive and superhuman. The best part is that there is still plenty to be gained with NNUE!

Search changes are not as extreme, but I added singular extensions, fixed some TT-eval shenanigans, and got a few more search patches in.

List of things to do in future:

The PV goes wild in mating endgames. I blame extensions for this, but have been unable to fix it yet. I will try and get it working properly for next release. It has no effect on strength, as the first move in the pv is still the best move, but it is annoying to see "m7" and then have the PV not be a mate.
add multithreading. Yes, I still haven't done that yet.
new arches, more data, better datagen script, quantizing nets and improving inference.
Two exes are included as usual, one on Linux, one on Windows. If you want one that's more optimized for your machine, git clone and make the repository.

Score of Willow 3.0 vs Willow 2.9 (balanced book, LTC):

ELO   | 316.94 +- 11.34 (95%)
CONF  | 60.0+0.60s Threads=1 Hash=128MB
GAMES | N: 5000 W: 3869 L: 258 D: 873
https://chess.swehosting.se/test/2783/


Willow rating progress:
Pl Engine Rating Score Games %
793 Willow 2.8 2941.0 48.00 186 25.81
925 Willow 2.7 2712.7 39.00 123 31.71
1170 Willow 2.5.11 2273.1 10.00 51 19.61
1243 Willow 2.6 2095.7 13.00 186 6.99

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