Renegade 1.3.0 - new version chess engine

Renegade - UCI chess engine  Author: Krisztian Peocz  

Rating Chess Engines Diary CEDR=3621

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.1.3.0:

I'm thrilled to announce version 1.3.0 of Renegade! 🚀

This release includes dozens of patches, including staged move generation, history pruning, fractional reductions, and a large number of refinements made to existing heuristics. The engine now also manages time better, and spends more time on difficult moves.

The neural network architecture is unchanged, but its training dataset had been entirely regenerated, significantly improving the data quality. The current network was trained on 8.4 billion positions from 91 million games.

As a result of these improvements, this version is up to 90 elo stronger in standard chess, and should scale better to longer time controls as it was tuned across 130 thousand games.

Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who helped me out or shown interest in this project!

Changelog

Detailed changelog

Progression testing

Standard chess (UHO_Lichess_4852_v1.epd):

Elo   | 78.32 +- 1.84 (95%)

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

Games | N: 40000 W: 14886 L: 6019 D: 19095

Penta | [46, 1812, 8220, 9073, 849]

Elo   | 91.56 +- 3.40 (95%)

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

Games | N: 10000 W: 3775 L: 1199 D: 5026

Penta | [0, 319, 1923, 2621, 137]

DFRC (DFRC.epd):

Elo   | 86.41 +- 4.11 (95%)

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

Games | N: 10024 W: 3644 L: 1201 D: 5179

Penta | [28, 446, 2042, 2047, 449]

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 1.3.0 download

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