Zappa Mexico II Release Notes 1/25/2008

1. Changelist:
added futility/extended futility pruning
a lot of speed optimizations that were mostly eliminated by calling
eval() at every node
singular extensions are now automatically disabled for >8 cores
max hash table size increased to 1TB !
some very small extra eval terms.
Overall not a lot; this is strictly a maintenance upgrade. Should
be similar to the original Zappa Mexico in most positions except
for (hopefully) getting a bigger depth due to extra pruning.
Perhaps +20 elo can be expected.
2. Instant Move
I have gotten some questions about this. Zappa will move instantly
whenever a move is singular, i.e. much better than the others.
It's a feature, not a bug :) These are not always immediately
obvious recaptures, but if you analyze in multipv mode the
alternatives to the singular move should always be considerably
lower in score (> 0.5 pawns).
3. Strelka
Since this release comes immediately after the release of the
Strelka source code, I assume that there will be a hue and cry from
the unwashed masses about how I am pirating the intellectual
property of Vasik Rajlich. Let me just immediately say that there
are simply no new ideas in Strelka anyway; my shock at reading the
Strelka source code was not generated by the brilliancies contained
therein but by the lack thereof. Looking at Strelka finally
convinced me to do some things that everyone else has done for a
long time (like futility pruning), and to clean up my code a bit
since I had always been developing in "crunch" mode. I did not add
any eval terms from Strelka (my view being that Zappa's eval is way
better than Strelka's anyway) and I also did not do the crazy
futility pruning where it drops into the qsearch at depth 3. In
summary, Strelka was more a source of motivation than chess ideas.
Of course, you will just have to take my word for it until some
enterprising Russian hacker disassembles Zappa :)
4. Opening Book
I have also gotten some questions about an opening book for Zappa.
My current recommendation is Sedat Canbaz's confidently named
Perfect.ctg for Chessbase GUIs, free from SedatChess.com.
enjoy,
anthony