Prophet and chess4j now understand knight outposts. An outpost, as implemented in Prophet, is a square that cannot be attacked by an enemy pawn. Putting a knight on an outpost can be a strong advantage, particularly if that knight is supported by a friendly pawn.

In the following diagram, the knight on D4 is on an outpost square, but the knight on E4 is not since it may be run off by the F7 pawn at some point.

The bonus (or penalty) given for an outpost varies by square. An additional bonus is given if the outpost is supported, such as the knight on the D4 square above. The “supported” bonus also varies by square. This is possibly overkill, but with an auto-tuner , I reasoned the more knobs and dials it has to minimize error the better. (Or at least, it can’t hurt as long as we guard against over-fitting.)

As expected this feature isn’t a huge gain in terms of ELO, but it did net a few points. It also puts the latest development version at +50 ELO over Prophet 4.2, which was my goal before doing a new release. Before doing a release I’m going to test a couple more terms, both expected to be minor gains at most, but after that I’m going to switch gears so it’d be good to clear them from the board. Those terms are “trapped bishop” and “supported rook on open file.”

Since I released Prophet 4.2 I’ve made a couple of additional evaluation changes:

1. The passed pawn bonus has been made more granular. Where it used to be a simple bonus for a passed pawn, now it varies depending on the pawn’s rank. 40,000 bullet games says that change was worth about 14 ELO.
2. Bishop and queen mobility has been made non-linear. This change was inspired by Erik Madsen’s MadChess blog – https://www.madchess.net/2014/12/16/madchess-2-0-beta-build-29-piece-mobility/ . The idea is to encourage piece development. I had originally plugged Erik’s values in verbatim, but they didn’t mesh well with existing weights and testing showed it weakened the program. After running the auto-tuner, this change brought in an additional 22 ELO.

In my first attempt at running the auto-tuner, I just started with the previously tuned weights, plus Erik’s values for bishop and queen mobility, but the tuner couldn’t seem to find any improvements. The error bounced around a little, going up and down, and not making any progress. I eventually decided to do a complete reset. I set the piece values to the traditional 1/3/3/5/9 values, and everything else to 0. Then I re-tuned and validated with some bullet games. The learning curve:

Fresh off the heals of these improvements, Prophet played in an informal online engine blitz tourney today. Unfortunately it was a pretty rough outing, placing just 16/20 with 2.5 points out of 9. It was a very strong field though. Even the 10th place finisher is nearly 3000 ELO on CCRL’s 40/2 list.

:Tourney Players: Round 9 of 9 
:
:     Name              Rating Score Perfrm Upset  Results 
:     ----------------- ------ ----- ------ ------ ------- 
:  1 +LczTinker         [2971]  6.5  [2937] [   0] +07w =05w =06b =03b +02w =04b =09w +11w +12b 
:  2 +NightmareX        [2909]  6.5  [2939] [   0] +12w =06w +09b =04w -01b =05w +07b +08w +11b 
:  3 +ChessSystemTalX   [2900]  6.5  [2898] [  35] +10w +09w =08b =01w =06b +07w =05b =04w +13b 
:  4 +RubiChess         [2875]  6.5  [2947] [  77] +13w +11w =05b =02b +08w =01w =06b =03b +09w 
:  5 +ArasanX           [2859]  6.0  [2836] [ 110] +14w =01b =04w =08b +12w =02b =03w =09b +16w 
:  6 +WaspX             [2830]  6.0  [2679] [ 181] +15w =02b =01w +17b =03w =08b =04w +13w =10b 
:  7 +TheBaron          [2569]  5.5  [2457] [   3] -01b +14w +16w =11b +17w -03b -02w +18b +15b 
:  8 +Goldbar           [2861]  5.0  [2533] [  19] +16w +17b =03w =05w -04b =06w =13b -02b +18w
:  9 +Marvin            [2752]  5.0  [2683] [ 162] +18w -03b -02w +16b +11w +12b =01b =05w -04b 
: 10 +Nalwald           [2500]  5.0  [2325] [ 165] -03b +18w =15b -12b -13w +17b +16w +14b =06w 
: 11 +atomGoldbar       [2575]  4.5  [2480] [   0] +20w -04b +13w =07w -09b +16b +14w -01b -02w 
: 12 +WaDuuttie         [2567]  4.5  [2411] [   0] -02b +15w =14b +10w -05b -09w +18b +17w -01w 
: 13 +rpiArminius       [2272]  4.0  [2425] [ 522] -04b +20w -11b =14w +10b +15w =08w -06b -03w 
: 14 +atomFloyd         [2242]  4.0  [2267] [ 177] -05b -07b =12w =13b +15w +18w -11b -10w +17b 
: 15 +Skiull            [1966]  3.0  [2170] [ 410] -06b -12b =10w +18w -14b -13b +17w =16b -07w 
: 16 -Prophet           [2253]  2.5  [2325] [ 351] -08b +19w -07b -09w +18b -11w -10b =15w -05b
: 17 -Skipper           [1662]  2.0  [2219] [1120] +19b -08w +18b -06w -07b -10w -15b -12b -14w 
: 18 +atomSargon        [1840]  0.0  [1974] [   0] -09b -10b -17w -15b -16w -14b -12w -07w -08b 
: 19 +atomNightmare     [forf]  0.0  [1557] [   0] -17w -16b 
: 20 +POS               [forf]  0.0  [2023] [   0] -11b -13b 
:
:     Average Rating    2474.2 

Next up- I’m going to continue with the mobility theme a little longer by testing rook mobility, then knight outposts, trapped bishops, and connected rooks on open files. I don’t expect any of those will be big points by themselves but cumulatively they might be worth a bit.