Renegade 1.2.0 - new version chess engine

Renegade - UCI chess engine  Author: Krisztian Peocz  

Rating Chess Engines Diary CEDR=3426

Renegade is a chess engine written in C++ using Visual Studio 2019. It values readability and simplicity, and uses the UCI protocol to communicate, making it easy to connect it to chess frontends. Under construction since October 7, 2022 and released publicly on January 15, 2023.  

The project can be compiled using Visual Studio 2019 with C++20 features enabled. The engine makes heavy use of `popcnt` and `lzcnt` instructions, thus only processors from 2013 or so are supported, but the calls to these instructions are wrapped in a custom function, and replacing them with something more compatible is relatively straightforward. Currently only Windows binaries are compiled, but in the future I would like to make them for Linux as well.

v.1.2.0:

After almost a year in the making, I'm excited to announce version 1.2.0! 🎉

The engine got a lot stronger, mainly thanks to a large number of incremental search improvements, various optimizations, and smarter evaluation. Against the previous release, this version is up to 170 elo stronger and wins dozens of gamepairs for each one it loses.

Renegade now features a greatly improved, over 20 times as large neural network, and makes use of techniques such as king buckets and horizontal mirroring. The current network was trained on 5.6 billion positions over the course of 4 days.

Finally, this release adds support for multithreaded search, and Renegade has been featured on TCEC and CCC where it's been successfully using hundreds of threads for quite some time now.

As usual, big-big thank you to everyone who helped out and took interest!

Changelog

Detailed changelog

Progression testing

The book used is UHO_Lichess_4852_v1.epd.

Elo   | 169.92 +- 1.91 (95%)

Conf  | 10.0+0.10s Threads=1 Hash=16MB

Games | N: 40002 W: 20546 L: 2406 D: 17050

Penta | [7, 332, 3918, 13002, 2742]

Elo   | 167.14 +- 3.27 (95%)

Conf  | 50.0+0.50s Threads=1 Hash=128MB

Games | N: 10000 W: 4971 L: 500 D: 4529

Penta | [1, 55, 853, 3654, 437]

You know the drill, the gain will be more modest for balanced books, and against other engines.

Renegade 1.1.9 JA vs other engines:

Sloth 2.0 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Trinket 3.5.0 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Topple 0.8.1 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Thrawn 2.1 JA	6/6	+6	6 Games
Reggz 0.6.0	6/6	+6	6 Games
Roc2 2.0.4	5.5/6	+5	6 Games
Yakka 1.2	5.5/6	+5	6 Games
Stro4k 3.0 JA	5.5/6	+5	6 Games
Sentinel 2.0	4/4	+4	4 Games
Odonata 1.0.0 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Mufasa 0.2.1 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Fatalii 0.9.0	4/4	+4	4 Games
Gnuchess 6.2.9 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
GOOB 1.8.9 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Pioneer 0.3.2 JA	4/4	+4	4 Games
Altair 7.1.5 JA	2/4	+0	4 Games
Stockfish dev-20250213	1.5/4	-1	4 Games
Booot 7.4	1/4	-2	4 Games
YuliGM 19	0.5/4	-3	4 Games
Kopyto 5df55e1	2/2	+2	2 Games
Motsog 22	2/2	+2	2 Games

Renegade 1.2.0 download

github:https://github.com/pkrisz99/Renegade/releases/