TacTurn V1 (Info Only,Use V1.1 release for attached binaries)

TacTurn V1 — Release Notes

First public release · Author: Umar Khan · License: MIT · Protocol: UCI

TacTurn V1 is the first public version of the engine. Internally it was
developed as 1.4.9 — the repository's HISTORY.md carries the complete
engineering ledger with every test verdict — and V1 is that exact engine
with a UCI protocol compliance upgrade for public testing. The chess
core (search, evaluation, NNUE, book, move generation) is bit-identical
to that development build: the bench fingerprint (188,416 nodes at depth 9)
is unchanged on every platform and ISA tier. All changes live in the host
UCI layer and in build portability.

Engine identity: id name TacTurn V1 · id author Umar Khan

Protocol fixes vs the original development harness

1. Responsive stop / quit / isready during search — the search
   now runs on a worker thread while the main thread keeps reading stdin.
   Previously go infinite + stop deadlocked the GUI, and quit was
   ignored until the time budget expired.
2. Hash option declared in megabytes (default 32, min 1, max 32768).
   The old declaration (default 86016 min 12 max 30) made GUIs clamp or
   reject standard values such as 256/512 MB. Same 16 B/entry mapping as
   before — the actual table allocation for a given MB value is unchanged.
3. go ... movestogo N is parsed and used: period-based repeating
   time controls (CCRL 40/15 = 40 moves / 15 min repeating) now get a
   moves-to-go-aware allocation (soft = t/(mtg+2) + 0.75·inc, hard cap
   bounded so one unstable move can never eat a period). The legacy
   formula is kept bit-identically for increment-only clocks.
4. Clean engine identity: id name TacTurn V1 with
   id author Umar Khan (the development harness printed the doubled
   "TacTurn TacTurn 1.4.9 (host UCI)" and no author).
5. OwnBook option (default false) — documents and enforces that the
   UCI build never uses the engine's embedded book (an Android-app-only
   feature). Rating lists require own books off; the default is compliant
   and testable.
6. MultiPV (1–8) via sequential root-exclusion searches, with full
   PV lines from the transposition table.
7. Mate scores reported as score mate N instead of raw ~32000 cp;
   nps added to info lines; the final info line before bestmove
   carries the full PV.
8. Clear Hash button — clears the TT and learned histories (the
   same state ucinewgame produces).
9. Robust setoption parsing — multi-word option names, missing
   values, and unknown options can never derail the parser.
10. Windows portability — posix_memalign → _aligned_malloc (Win32
    guard), unistd.h → io.h guard, and the pthread helper-thread
    launch links cleanly under MinGW-w64 posix-threads. Windows builds
    are fully static.

Portability fix (critical for testers)

The original development binary was compiled with -march=native on an
AVX-512 machine and would crash with an illegal instruction on
Haswell-class hardware (e.g. the CCRL reference i7-4770k). This release
ships explicit ISA tiers instead:

Tier	Needs	Note
x86-64	SSE2 (any 64-bit CPU)	maximum compatibility
x86-64-v3	AVX2/BMI2 (Haswell 2013+)	recommended
x86-64-v4	AVX-512 (Ice Lake / Zen 4+)	modern CPUs

Identity fingerprints

• Bench: TacTurn-V1-* bench 9 → Total nodes: 188,416 (all tiers,
  all platforms).
• Startpos depth-9 search (contempt 12, 1 thread): identical best move and
  score on every tier.
• perft 5 (startpos): 4,865,609.

Source layout of this kit

• engine/ — the C++17 engine core (unchanged from the 1.4.9 development line)
• host/uci.cpp — the UCI harness with the fixes above
• Windows ttable.h aligned-allocation guard
• Docs: ENGINE-README.md, this file, UCI-COMPLIANCE-REPORT.md