Fruit 2.0 released!

[Joachim Rang]

Hi,

in the next hour Leo will add the new Fruit 2.0 on his website. The new version comes with source as usual. Binaries for Linux come (perhaps) later.

The biggest news: Fruit is no longer a blitzer! Fabien made a risky decision to activate history pruning with rather aggressive values, so you will notice Fruit prunes away a lot and reaches good depth rather soon. This makes him most probably weaker in lightning or blitz, but will (hopefully) pay off in longer time controls. If you aren't satisfied with the blitz-performance of Fruit try deactivating history pruning.

The threshold of history pruning is set to 60%. This is a wild guess, since we hadn't time to test it, so feel free to experiment with it. More safe is for example 40% which will probably do better also in rapid time controls. You can try 80% but with such aggressive pruning it is likely that Fruit misses some tactical shots. I think it is a great parameter to play with and there might be much potential for playing strength. I think the implementation is also interesting for engine authors, since it differs from other engines (according to Fabien).

Another good try is futility and delta pruning. It does better in testsuites and also better in tests (about 10 Elo) but Fabien wasn't satisfied with the statistical reliability of the data so he decided to deactivate it by default. My personal opinion is, that it is a safe bet.

The other options are rather selfexplaining, you can change the playing style with them but don't expect much gain in playing strength.

Hope you have fun and merry christmas

regards Joachim

[Joachim Rang]

Hi again,

Leo just updated the archive with a faster executable from Aaron Gordon. The version number is the same, but the executable is named differently (Fruit20-fast.exe). Sorry for the confusion, but if you already downloaded Fruit you should redownload it, since you can expect about 15% speed gain.

regards Joachim