gull chess

[ThinkingALot]

But even your Elos are going down with more Nodes ...

Not rapidly enough to suggest zero increase on long TC .

Well, Gull 1.2 is only 3 points stronger than Gull 1.1 according to IPON... Looks like Gull 1.2's strength scales pretty bad when increasing time control.
For now I have only one hypothesis which explains this issue. Perhaps there's some flaw in the exclusion search, cause it's the only heuristic which cannot be tested with the use of ultra short TC.

[ThinkingALot]

Here's a link to Gull 1.2 with Large Pages disabled: http://www.spaadyshare.com/VYF5Y7GDBYF4 ... _no_LP.zip.
This build is slightly slower than the original version. So there's no point in downloading it unless you'd like to test engines without large page support.

[Werner]

Hi,
a) I am sorry - we got the same test result for our 40/20 list: no difference to version 1.1
b) I was not able to run more than 1 match with new gull on my Windows XP Quad as the engine enabled large pages. I made the tests then under an new account without rights to enable large pages.
In my short tests the version with LP was about 8% faster (kns).

Ok - and now I downloaded the new version without LP support.
Hope you find the reason why there is no advantage - good luck!

Werner
CEGT Team

[fgates]

Hi,

I haven't build with Microsoft tools in many years.. (writing Xcode and Lisp now). I started a console project and added gull.cpp but had some errors (_BitScanForward64 and _BitScanReverse64 wouldn't compile) and then, after a workaround, several calls weren't located, which i assume means i'm missing the proper dlls.

I'd appreciate any assistance on project config. The code looks very cool and want to step through it.

Thanks!
Joseph

[ThinkingALot]

1) Try creating an "Empty Project" instead of a console project.
2) Gull's source is 64-bit by default. So in order to compile it with a 32-bit compiler one need to comment the "#undef W32_BUILD" line (Line 7 of the source).

[fgates]

Thanks, that worked great. I still had issues with _BitScanForward64 and _BitScanReverse64; it is compiled for 64 but the latest VS release might require something else. I worked around it for now.

Engine looks great.

[ThinkingALot]

Gull II: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gullch ... t/download.
Mirror: http://www.spaadyshare.com/W9Y76UR161KN/Gull_II.zip.
P.S. A somewhat faster compile can be made with the use of Intel C++ 13.0.

[User923005]

I have found that recent 64 bit Mingw versions (4.7x, 4.8x) produce really excellent code.
I guess that Mingw will be hard to beat.

Pound for pound, gull chess is pretty amazing.
There is a lot to learn from there.

[User923005]

Why do you have HASH_STORE undefined by default?
That is very counter-intuitive.

[User923005]

I suggest to examine this:
ext = Ext(CM->ext_flags);
because Ext shifts by 16 bits, and ext_flags is unsigned char.
It cannot possibly do anything useful.