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



New version chess engine: Velvet 6.0.0 NNUE

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Velvet - UCI Chess Engine
Author: Martin Hornet, 
Rating CEDR (Chess Engines Diary Rating)=3471

It is based upon my previous web-based engine Wasabi, which can be played here.
Installation
x86_64-modern - recommended for recent CPUs from 2013 onwards (requires a CPU with support for the BMI1 instruction sets)
x86_64-popcnt - for older 64-Bit CPUs, which support the POPCNT instruction, but not BMI1
x86_64-vintage - for older 64-Bit CPUs, which support neither POPCNT nor BMI1

v.6.0.0
This releases comes with a new neural network architecture and some small search improvements 🎄

Estimated strength increase: ~ 35 Elo

Notes:

The strength increase in FRC/DFRC is much lower (< 10 Elo)
Generating more DFRC training positions for the bigger neural network is planned for a future v6.1.0 release
Changes
Change neural network architecture from 3x5x768->2x512->1 to 32x768->2x512->1
New neural network trained from v5.3.0 (and v6.0.0 dev) self-play games
Updated training tools to support training of bigger networks
Some refactorings and optimizations
Statistics
Elo change: v6.0.0 compared to v5.3.0 against the same set of opponents
Move range: grouped by games won in less than x moves (each game only belongs to one group, so a game that ended in 57 moves would belong to the group "60", but not "80", "100", etc.)

Installation
The chess engine is available for Windows and Linux and requires a 64 Bit CPU.
There are optimized executables available for different CPU micro-architecture generations.

Starting with Velvet v4.1.0 there are also builds for macOS provided.
Currently there are no specific optimizations for the ARM-based/Apple Silicon builds implemented, so
the macOS builds for x86_64 might be faster.

If you have a relatively modern CPU (2013+) with AVX2 support, then the ...-x86_64-avx2 executable is highly recommended for best performance.

Velvet - Rating CEDR progres
Pl Engine Rating Score Games %
774 Velvet 5.2.1 3471.0 101.50 264 38.45
784 Velvet 5.3.0 3457.2 363.00 769 47.20
786 Velvet 5.2.0 3453.4 250.50 490 51.12
840 Velvet 4.0.1 3377.7 143.50 264 54.36
849 Velvet 5.0.0 3367.3 231.50 679 34.09
869 Velvet 4.1.0 3340.7 272.50 723 37.69
878 Velvet 4.0.0 3331.6 68.00 139 48.92
919 Velvet 5.1.0 3283.6 125.50 337 37.24
924 Velvet 3.3.0 3272.7 53.00 106 50.00


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