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2026-09-25factor out nn_train.py into a separate python project to make it more ↵tslil
manageable, add plotting and offline strength fit
2026-09-04TD-leaf and another negamax bugtslil
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
2026-09-02TD(lambda), and a big reworktslil
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
2023-01-16switch to explicit game state & important bug fix & clang formattslil clingman
Previously the code base assumed that there was a single, global game state which was the implicit target of all actions taken. Looking ahead at architectural improvements, this has now been (almost entirely) made explicit and functions take tak_state_p where necessary (and also where unnecessary). Two important fixes to actions.c were made: - Previously when generating the possible stack moves, stack height overflows (> 15) were not taken into account and this resulted in the tree search corrupting the board state. Now action search does not list all legal actions, rather the subset of these encodeable by the implementation. - The check for crushing on a stack move was incorrect (too strict), and this resulted in many legitimate moves being igonored. Finally, in other changes, weights have also been improved by training all games instead of some subset for chosen players, and clang-format was run on the codebase.
2023-01-15new neural network arch (faster + better) & minor changes + fixestslil clingman
Gone is the convolutional neural network, for it turns out not only is it more difficult to train, but all of the extra information about board layers didn't make much of a difference at this size. So cnn1986 has been replaced by nn1986, a standard, two-layer, dense nn configured as a binary classifier and (mis)used in that capacity. Note: total number of parameters is unchanged. HARK: this new nn exposes a bug somewhere in ctak. Run ctlm with self-play to see the completely borked board state at the end.
2021-01-29Cleaned up build systemtslil clingman
2021-01-28Skeleton readmetslil clingman