Each edition of Wasp, is a very pleasant surprise for fans of this "biting" chess engine.
Wasp is free chess engine available under the MIT license.
Source: Wasp homepage
Wasp can really "bite", it's one of the strongest chess engines, which has been consistently enhanced and developed for many years with the latest techniques and algorithms including a neural network.
Here are the results of previous versions of Wasp:
Source: CCRL
What changes have occurred in Wasp 6.50 - a detailed list can be found on the release note page; a few selections I will take the liberty of pasting here:
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I estimate that Wasp 6.50 is about 50 Elo stronger than Wasp 6.00.
The neural network for evaluation is similar to Wasp 6.00 except
that the number of neurons in the hidden layer has been increased to 1536.
Positions from games played in the last 6 months were added to the
training data bringing the total to about 220M positions. The positions were re-scored using a fixed 35K node search and a recent net. The target used to train the net is now based 80% on the search score and 20% on the game result. To create the final network, two 1024 nets were created and each were trained using about 300 "epochs" of 500M positions. These networks were then merged to create a 2048 neuron net and trained with about 50 additional "epochs". This net was then pruned to 1536 neurons and trained with about 50 more "epochs". I have no idea if this merging and pruning technique is actually better than just creating and training several 1536 node nets and picking the best one.
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Source: Wasp release note
Thank you very much to author Mr. John Stanback for releasing another version of Wasp.
I am very happy that Wasp 6.50 is available for many different platforms like Linux, Windows and Raspberry Pi.
I would love to test and incorporate Wasp's chess engine into MCERL competitions. It would certainly be a worthy and very threatening opponent for the strongest!
It would be great if a Mac version would also join this family :)
I encourage you to download Wasp from its home page.
It is worth mentioning that Mr. John Stanback on the Wasp website has posted a Technical section, where those interested will find a great deal of useful and informative information on the features of the Wasp chess engine.
In the Files area you will find free chess engines for download.
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