v4.1.0
This release contains some search-related improvements
Self-play strength increase: ~ 40 Elo
Changes
- Use counter and follow-up moves for history heuristics
- Add multi-cut pruning
- Adjust existing pruning logic
- Restrict SEE-based reductions and pruning
- Add jobs for automatically building macOS executables
Due to the lack of an ARM-based (Apple Silicon) computer, the new "apple-silicon" builds are untested.
Installation
The chess engine is available for Windows and Linux and requires a 64 Bit CPU.
There are optimized executables available for different CPU micro-architecture generations.
Starting with Velvet v4.1.0 there are also builds for macOS provided.
Currently there are no specific optimizations for the ARM-based/Apple Silicon builds implemented, so
the macOS builds for x86_64 might be faster.
If you have a relatively modern CPU (2013+) with AVX2 support, then the ...-x86_64-avx2 executable is highly recommended for best performance.
Executable | Description | Min. CPU Generation | Required Instruction Sets |
---|---|---|---|
x86_64-avx2 | Recommended for best performance on a modern CPU | Intel Haswell / Zen1 | AVX2, BMI1 |
x86_64-sse4-popcnt | Lower performance, recommended for CPUs without AVX2 support | Intel Nehalem / AMD Bulldozer | SSE4.2, SSE3, POPCNT |
x86_64-nopopcnt | Lowest performance, but compatible with most x86_64 CPUs | --- | SSE2, CMOV |
apple-silicon | Native builds for Apple Silicon processors (ARM aarch64) | Apple M1 |