[ANN] Donna v1.0 chess engine

[Michael Dvorkin]

Hi,

Donna is modern day chess engine implemented in Go. Its long list of technical features includes magic bitboards, iterative deepening, futility pruning and razoring, UCI protocol support, interactive REPL etc. Donna comes with 300+ Go tests and large suite of benchmark positions. On short time controls Donna's estimated strength is around ELO 2500.

Please give it a shot: https://github.com/michaeldv/donna

Enjoy ;-)

Michael

-- http://www.dvorkin.net

[Filip Zaludek]

Do you have nps comparison, bounds checking enabled/disabled, gccgo?

[minux]

I took a look at the README, and I'm surprised to see that you recommend

-gcflags -B.

I highly discourage any Go user from using that option in a regular basis. It

should only only used during benchmarking and seeing if the performance

problem is due to bound checking. It should NOT be your usual way of building

Go programs. Otherwise, you lost a lot of safety guarantee from using Go in

return for some performance gain.

To put it another way, if everyone is using -B, there won't be any incentives

for the Go authors to improve on bound checking performance.

[Michael Dvorkin]

In my tests bounds checking reduces raw performance by around 5%.

-M-

[Michael Dvorkin]

No doubt bounds checking is extremely valuable and I am using it all the time in development. In chess programming, however, every bit counts as raw speed translates into competitive advantage. Making the engine 5% faster by disabling runtime checks seems like no brainer.

-M-

[minux]

On Dec 18, 2014 10:48 PM, "Michael Dvorkin" <mi...@dvorkin.net> wrote:
> No doubt bounds checking is extremely valuable and I am using it all the time in development. In chess programming, however, every bit counts as raw speed translates into competitive advantage. Making the engine 5% faster by disabling runtime checks seems like no brainer.

Are you sure that you have optimized the program to such extend that removing bound checking is the last thing you can do? Have you profiled your package?

Even people doing numeric work in Go don't write -gcflags -B in their READMEs.