ctak/include/nn_input.c, branch hybrid_rootstrapAn implementation of Tak and a computer opponent in Chttps://git.l-3.space/ctak/atom/include/nn_input.c?h=hybrid_rootstrap2026-09-04T20:03:59ZTD-leaf and another negamax bug2026-09-04T20:03:59Ztsliltslil@posteo.de2026-09-03T19:17:22Zurn:sha1:1ca3309dad9d412870b2b793f33af7a7ccabd514
TD-lambda and TD-leaf are separated by the observation that minimax with a parameterised leaf heuristic is differentiable* in the parameters. "All" that had to be done was to extract the "principal variation": which one position survived all of the pruning to become the reported value.
This was a bit fiddly and uncovered a subtle bug (again) in negamax.c: we were not being complete in our overriding of the TT entry and by omitting key it was possible that later searches would find incorrect values.
The more interesting question to me was: how do we introduce enough variety while not corrupting the PV chain? I settled on having selfplay have one of the players be epsilon-random but the other greedy (minimax) and simply report only the greedy portion PV chain. This appears to work well enough in practice and doesn't introduce nonsense training data for the net (we don't force its actions to be nonsensical). I also deciced, perhaps in a departure from tradition, that we had good supervised labels for PVs that happened to be winning states, so the training overrides the targets in that case. Finally rolled back some of the ambition in nn_train.py default arguments.
*almost always
TD(lambda), and a big rework2026-09-02T11:13:01Ztsliltslil@posteo.de2026-08-30T18:46:07Zurn:sha1:241156da6f35cb888253e6b8814e7b61a76b4fc7
NOTE: 6x6 weights are as-yet untrained
On the performance side:
* switch from linked-list chaining hash table to direct mapping
* cache check_win by hash
* persist transposition tables across plies (this was a big deal and difficult to puzzle out)
* add align directives to the network floats
* prepare_nn_input gained a small LUT to avoid branching (i suppose you might call this 1D embedding)
* apply mtune=native for the native builds
On the correctness side:
* Zobrist has now includes the ply parity
* the network now predicts something in [-1, 1] using tanh (approximated by polynomials)
* the training object is now MSE because we're learning a value estimate
* use .clangd instead of compile_commands.json
On the training side:
* completely forgo human-derived data set
* implement td(lambda), self-play, tournaments