After playing over 1000 games in cgos server, Hactar-7-197-p is now first among recently playing engines. Version has two improvements over previous version.
Network is now somewhat better. Training has gone thru 197-181=16 generation, and this made visible improvement.
However, biggest change is thinking in opponents time (“pondering”, thus -p). It helps as it gives more network evaluations. Big impact is also when normal search starts, pondering has created small tree to start with.
This small tree helps as GPU is providing number of parallel evaluations to build MC tree, and getting sensible place for these evaluations is possible as soon as there is small tree.
Testing smaller GPU
Most recent version Hactar-7-209a-p is using P4000 GPU instead of 1080ti; thus it is running with only half of the GPU power!
Still, it looks like Hactar-7-209a-p is almost as good as Hactar-7-197-p. This goes back to reducing latency of tree walk, NN evaluation, tree update cycle. Thus even if there is only half of the network evaluations, evaluations are a lot more relevant.
At some point I will make this improved engine to play using 1080ti. It will interesting to see its wining-%…