Ceres Chess Engine

EzioMagnifico · Post by **EzioMagnifico** » 16/07/2021, 15:01

Ceres v0.91
Thanks to the Author dje-dev

Download : https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/releases/tag/v0.91

Ceres Release Notes - version 0.91

Includes the improvements from 0.90-rc1 (Linux support, new backend without LC0.DLL dependency, search improvements, new BENCHMARK and BACKENDBENCH command line modes)
Additionally:

Enhanced time management, especially against Alpha/Beta style opponents
Further simplified installation: includes a weight file (703810) and pre-populated Ceres.json file in the box to allow immediate running without any configuration (thanks to Chad for this suggestion)
The speed of loading weights files is somewhat improved, and multi-gpu weight sharing (to reduce GPU memory usage) is now functional
Resolves a number of minor bugs impacting play
Tests suggest circa 5 to 10 Elo improvement versus 0.90-rc1, with hopefully yet more significant gains versus Stockfish
Note that CUDA 11.3 or greater improves the backend speed by approximately 12% on higher-end (and possibly also mid-range) GPUs
Note that the NVIDIA 1060, 1070, and 1080 GPUs are not supported by the new Ceres backend because they do not support fast FP16. Instead, users of these cards can fallback to the prior LC0.DLL backend by adding the following line to Ceres.json:

Kater Carlo · Post by **Kater Carlo** » 18/07/2021, 13:10

Minor update to v0.91, fixing a serious bug causing more than 100x slowdown for searches run using certain time controls (e.g. seconds per move). Thanks to ribbit for reporting.

https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/releases/download/0.91a/v0.91a.zip
Starting point:
Setting up Ceres
https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/blob/main/Setup.md

EzioMagnifico · Post by **EzioMagnifico** » 21/07/2021, 3:33

Ceres v0.91b
Thanks to the Author dje-dev

Download : https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/releases/tag/v0.91b

Minor update with fixes for improved compatibility with other programs:

Values shown by Nibbler GUI when configured to show Q were incorrect
Tournaments run using Octagon manager would falsely report time forfeit for Ceres because they relied upon sometimes incorrect Ceres self-reported elapsed search time

EzioMagnifico · Post by **EzioMagnifico** » 10/08/2021, 3:14

Ceres v0.93
Thanks to the Author dje-dev : smoke

Download : https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/releases/tag/v0.93

Update with improvements primarily related to speed and usability for games played at medium to long time controls:

the speed of tree rebuilding between moves is significantly improved (up to 40% for very large search trees),
thereby increasing effective nodes per second (by about 5% at long time controls)
a new UCI option MaxTreeNodes is added to limit search trees to a specified maximum size
additional performance optimizations improve search speed by about 2%
If installation issues are encountered, please note these most common causes:

NVIDIA 1060, 1070, 1080 and earlier generation GPUs are not directly supported
the Microsoft .NET 5.0 runtime is a prerequisite
the three NVIDIA DLLs (cublas64_11.dll, cublasLt64_11.dll, and cudart64_110.dll) must be found in the Ceres directory or on the system path. If not found, they can be obtained either by installing the CUDA toolkit from NVIDIA, or taken from the LC0 distribution ZIP file (https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/releases/download/v0.27.0/lc0-v0.27.0-windows-gpu-nvidia-cuda.zip)

EzioMagnifico · Post by **EzioMagnifico** » 27/09/2021, 2:14

Ceres v0.94
Thanks to the Author dje-dev

Ceres - an MCTS chess engine for research and recreation .

Download : https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/releases/tag/v0.94

Ceres 0.94 incorporates 3 significant new features as well as numerous smaller tweaks which improve the user experience.

The Elo improvements compared to version 0.93 are believed to be very modest (perhaps 5 Elo) at shorter time controls. However the root swapping enhancement definitely increases search speed by at least 7% with large searches. There are also theoretical reasons (e.g. the greater abundance of transpositions) to believe the other enhancements might be more impactful with larger search trees. But this is not confirmed due to the time and computation resources need to perform such tests.

guestdestroyer · Post by **guestdestroyer** » 08/12/2021, 11:14

Ceres 0.95-RC7

I compiled this from source code updated some days ago and already tested it.
Seems it uses GPU more effeciently than Ceres 0.94.

Put your favourite (strongest) Leela network in Networks folder.
Set options as network and syzygypath in file Ceres.json which you edit by a text editor.
Write full Syzygypath with slashes instead of backslashes for example C:/Users/2610072/Documents/CBMini/Syzygy

To run Ceres Net5.0 must be installed (dotnet.microsoft.com) which is done in minutes.
To compile Ceres I installed git for Windows and executed "dotnet build -c Release" in a Windows terminal in src directory.
This is described in Setup.md which is part of the source code and can be edited by text editor.

Ceres 0.95-RC7

guestdestroyer · Post by **guestdestroyer** » 20/01/2022, 9:41

Ceres 0.95-RC8

download here

Post by **timetraveller** » 08/02/2022, 10:48

Ceres v0.96

v0.96 features a large set of small to medium-sized speed (5% to 20%) and play quality (5 to 20 Elo) enhancements and a few additional features.

* significantly improved time management and smart pruning logic
* support neural networks having 512 filters on Ampere-based GPUs (based on code of Ankan from Lc0 project)
* dozens of performance optimizations, including better backend scaling with multiple GPU
* corrected some failures to recognize draw by repetition in search tree (thanks to Kovax for identifying problem)
* removed the limitation that draws by repetition are recognized only within last 22 ply
* corrected a problem with search stopping in Chessbase/Fritz GUI
* support incomplete tablebase files (DTM but no DTZ) (thanks to lepned for identifying this prior limitation)
* tournament feature enhancements to support more than 2 players (thanks to lepned)
* add a new UCI verb "dump-info"
* add support for GPU backends with internally partitioned batch sizes (e.g. "GPU:0[266]" for max batch size 266)
* corrected possible tree overflow upon search continuation when running with MaxTreeSize
* significant internal architectural changes to engine code for efficiency
* significantly improved memory management
* expose sibling and uncertainty features in UCI options (default off)
* add Ceres.json setting LimitsManagerName to specify pluggable alternate limits manager
* ongoing efforts to improve code quality and documentation and extend the external API

https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/releases/tag/v0.96

guestdestroyer · Post by **guestdestroyer** » 08/03/2022, 9:57

Ceres097-RC1

Download here

guestdestroyer · Post by **guestdestroyer** » 14/03/2022, 10:08

Ceres 0.97RC2

Download here

EzioMagnifico · Post by **EzioMagnifico** » 27/03/2022, 12:55

Ceres 0.97RC3
Thanks to the Author dje-dev

Download : https://mega.nz/file/9V0RkKBJ#uYF-QEqQvHOgwcghFzoQrIsA8sjpHNLPBkirSqX4Sk8

Alternative Download : https://uploadmx.com/e5r4fwxkpjxf

Tito Marka · Post by **Tito Marka** » 27/03/2022, 14:25

OK OK OK

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