New version chess engine: Texel 1.12 NNUE

Texel - UCI Chess engines
Rating Chess Engines Diary CEDR=3507, Author - Peter Osterlund

v.1.12:

2025-01-05: Texel 1.12 (ELO: +85)

Neural network improvements:

Speed up matrix multiplication for AVX-512.

New network based on new training data.

Use 4 "heads" (all NN layers except the first) for evaluation. The active head depends on the number of pieces on the board.

Increase NN layer 1 output size from 256 to 384.

Tablebases:

Measure thinking time more accurately. Useful when TB files are on mechanical disks.

Better handling of DTZ scores in search.

Avoid expensive (wrong side to move) DTZ probes in search.

Add UCI parameter to control required search depth for DTZ probes.

Measure time required to perform a TB probe instead of guessing. This avoids time losses in fast games when TB files are on mechanical disks.

Allow RTB WDL probes in some cases even if hmc > 0.

Change TB swindle depth from 16 to "15+minProbeDepth", to avoid slowdown in late middlegame/early endgame when TB files are on mechanical disks.

Search:

Implement the counter move heuristic.

Implement multi-cut pruning based on singular search score.

Adjust singular extension search parameters.

Allow both extension and reduction in the same search node.

Remove no longer useful "recapture" and "going into pawn endgame" extensions.

Reduce aspiration window size.

Other:

Use multiple threads to initialize the transposition table.

Better handling of mate scores in the transposition table.

Fix handling of empty strings in UCI string options.

Texel 1.11 vs other engines:

Texel 1.12 download
All files (games, tables and engines) - download from page

Chess Engines Diary