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2026-09-09~25% speedup in selfplay due to: incremental zobrist hashing, smarter road ↵tslil
checking, re-using the input computed for the NN
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
2023-01-29switch to returning an array of actions instead of a linked listaction_arraytslil clingman
- attempts to keep the same move ordering as the list method - saves ~170msec on a depth 7 search for a given board configuration - there is room to improve the pre-allocation size estimates, these bounds are not obviously tight and it may or may not be faster to have tighter bounds or even some form of estimation
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.
2021-10-05Welcome geminict!tslil clingman
This is a special interface to negamax_cnn1986 which is designed to generate output for use in a CGI tak interface to be used over gemini. Also in this commit is a reformating of the various source files to use the traditional tab width of 8 spaces.
2021-06-01Trying to make things fastertslil
I tried the following, but they all made things worse: - moving away from the singly-linked (tail tracking) list for actions by: + using an array zipper for a deque + using an array to poorly hold a floating deque - caching the results of generating move lists in the transposition table and then + copying the resulting list/zip/deque instead of generating it + applying the move-to-front without copying, but this made the search order worse. Presumably in this case shallower nodes were messing up the search tree with garbage moves? I think some of this is not supposed to happen, but i have just the right combination of poor evaluation function and naively ordered and cheap move generation that i'm in a local minimum here.
2021-03-28Fix copyright notice in files, and small preemptive optimisationtslil clingman
Eventually there'll be a more complicated data generation step than the one we're presently using, so having it in-lined in the loop is wasteful. Ideally also this would be update per ply and we could avoid recalculating it entirely for every query -- though it's probably ``fast enough'' for now. Also, caching is WIP.
2021-02-05Rename ct_k -> ct, IANAL but ...tslil
2021-01-30Try to squeeze out a little more performancetslil clingman
``Common wisdom'' dictates that placements are often better than stack moves, so we bias the generated move list in this fashion. Seems to be a little faster.
2021-01-28Added license information!tslil clingman
2021-01-28It would appear that any function call whatsoever is slower :/tslil clingman
For now we'll stay with directly recomputing it at each non-terminal node
2021-01-26Somehting along these lines, i'm tiredtslil clingman
2021-01-26Storing best moves!tslil clingman