Releasing Little Wing 0.4.0

After a month of intense work, the new version 0.4.0 of Little Wing, a bitboard chess engine written in Rust, is out!

It should play better chess now, going up in strength from 1650 ELO to a bit over 2000 ELO:

Rank Name                         Elo    +    - games score oppo. draws
   1 Dorpsgek Dillinger 1        2257   10   10  4800   72%  2066   12%
   2 RattateChess 1.0 Nosferatu  2200    9    9  4799   65%  2074   13%
   3 Sjaak II 1.4.1              2183    9    9  4799   63%  2077   15%
   4 Napoleon                    2115    9    9  4800   53%  2086   14%
   5 Little Wing v0.4.0          2054    9    9  4799   45%  2095   14%
   6 Poor little Pinkus          2039    9    9  4799   43%  2097   11%
   7 Cinnamon 2.0                2027    9    9  4798   41%  2099   14%
   8 Sayuri 2017.09.29           1844   11   11  4800   19%  2125    9%

There's still a lot of work to do on the evaluation side but I'm happy with the search side for now.

Added

• Add library with public API and documentation
• Add getopt to parse program options
• Add readline to user interface
• Add piece square tables to evaluation
• Add upper and lower bounds in transposition table
• Add age field in transposition table
• Add delta pruning to quiescence search
• Add transposition table to quiescence search
• Add basic UCI support
• Add very basic parallel search in threads with shared transposition table

Changed

• Improve CLI
• Improve statistics debug output
• Refactor many parts of the code
• Allow NMP, IID, and LMR at shallower depth
• Set NMP R to 3

Links

• https://github.com/vinc/littlewing
• https://vinc.cc/binaries/littlewing-v0.4.0
• https://docs.rs/littlewing/0.4.0/littlewing

Tags: news, littlewing, chess