iCE 1.0 breaks through the 2700 ELO barrier

It's about 9 month since I released iCE 1.0 and it has played now well over 800 games for the CCRL. Its ratings is stabilizing with more games played and it has now reached the 2700 ELO mark.

I thought I make a screenshot. Just in case it does not last for long. Currently iCE is playing in the already very strong division 3 of the CCRL where it is one of the weakest engine of that division. Probably it will score some bad losses and lose some points again.

But for now time for a little celebration.

Older versions of iCE

A fellow programmer asked me about older weaker versions of iCE to measure progress against. I think this is a nice idea. I remember when I started most of the programs I found were so strong iCE did lose almost every game. I measured progress by the moves until checkmate was delivered.

So I looked up my old files. I did not have an ice01 executable anymore but I still had a collection of the sources and they still compiled, yeah !

So here is a link to a fresh compile of old ice01. This version is from 2011. It is not able to use a book already.

http://www.fam-petzke.de/downloads/ice01.exe

I have no package of ice02 anymore. This was before I was using git. The sources were modified to become ice03 and I don't have the ones that compile to ice02 anymore.

But I still have a iCE 0.3 available. You find it here

http://www.fam-petzke.de/downloads/iCE_v03_2750.zip

Both ice01 and ice03 are only available as 32 bit versions. They don't compile as native x64 applications due to some inline assembler that I used. They run however fine on a x64 system, just a bit slower.

iCE 1.0 is the first iCE that is available as native x64 application.

Have fun with them. I hope they help.

Move ordering

The way the chess engine search demand a very good ordering of moves. To be able the handle the huge search space it is important to search the best move in a certain position first. Often it turns out that this move is so good, the opponent won't play moves leading into that position and then you don't have to look at the remaining moves at all.

There are several techniques available to deal with that and iCE uses most of them. Last time I measured it did search the best move first in more than 90% of the positions.

For that I tried to use some knowledge in the function that orders moves, e.g. order moves with an attacked piece early and moves to squares attacked by opponents pawns late in the list so the function got a bit complex.

One technique I do not use (I tried once but it failed) is history heuristics. This is a simple statistics. Moves that were in other earlier searched positions good are tried before moves that have no or a bad history. I wondered whether I can maybe now replace a bit of my complex knowledge with such a statistics to simplify the engine a bit.

And it turned out I can.

I striped all my move ordering functions that handle quiet moves from knowledge and replaced it by history. The now simpler engine even seems to play a bit better, not by a huge margin but statically significant.

After a lot of failed attempts I'm happy I encountered now a change that works and even makes things simpler. However the idea is well known and widely applied. So nothing to get to excited about.