The most aggressive chess engine ever written, Patricia is a killer bunny who will not hesitate to ram as many pieces as possible down your throat.
The metric that Patricia's aggression claims are based off of is Stefan Pohl's EAS tool (found here), which is the most well known and well regarded tool for determining the aggressiveness of chess engines. It looks at a combination of factors, such as sacrifice rate, short win rate, and unnecessary draw rate, and outputs a score that captures how "exciting" an engine tends to play.
The average engine's EAS score generally falls between 50,000 and 100,000. The most aggressive top engine is Stockfish, due to its extreme tactical ability; it has an EAS score of 190,000. The most aggressive engine of any notable strength that Stefan Pohl has ever seen is Velvet 4.1.0, which topped out at a remarkable EAS Score of 280,000.
Patricia, with an EAS score of 420,000 in gauntlet testing, is leaps and bounds above any engine that has ever existed in terms of attacking, sacrificing, and playing stylishly.
It's worth noting that Patricia is still well into superhuman territory, with an estimated CCRL elo of 3300-3350; she can put up a solid fight against top engines, and can crush any human or weak engine that dares to oppose her.
This is not a comprehensive list of search features that Patricia has.
Patricia supports a few options for users:
Hash
: The memory alloted to the transposition table.
Threads
: Number of threads to search with.
UCI_LimitStrength
: Enables Patricia to be weakened using UCI_Elo
.
UCI_Elo
: Sets Patricia to play at a given strength range, anywhere from 500 to 3000. These ratings were calibrated by playing many matches against engines of all strengths.
MultiPV
: Patricia searches the best X moves instead of only looking for the best line.
Skill_Level
: Sets Patricia to play at one of 20 possible strength levels. They are:
Skill Level ELO
1 500
2 800
3 1000
4 1200
5 1300
6 1400
7 1500
8 1600
9 1700
10 1800
11 1900
12 2000
13 2100
14 2200
15 2300
16 2400
17 2500
18 2650
19 2800
20 3000
go nodes
: Search a position for a given number of nodes.
go depth
: Search a position to a given depth.
go movetime
: Search a position for a given number of milliseconds.
Patricia's evaluation is a neural network with a 768x2->768->1 perspective arch, trained on 2.4 billion positions of my other engine Willow's data. It has been additionally retrained on a filtered dataset of 10 million positions specially selected for being "aggressive positions", in order to increase Patricia's understanding of them and to make her more likely to play into similar positions.
Code for filtering programs are found in the utils/ directory, and are indentified as follows:
position_filter_1
that saves positions where we are doing much better than material balance would suggest.Patricia currently uses positions that were filtered out by script 9.
Additionally, the converter.cpp
file allows you to transform bullet-format data into text data, so that you can then use the filtering scripts on the resulting file.
All filtering programs are run with the command ./[exe] [input.txt] [output.txt]
. You'll have to compile the particular program that you want to run yourself, or you can ask me for a binary for a specific filtering method.
Patricia has support for data generation; in order to compile the datagen script, run make datagen
in the engines
directory. This will give you an executable named data
; run ./data [number of threads] [optional EPD opening book]
to start datagen, and exit the process whenever you want with Ctr-C.
A huge shoutout to Stefan Pohl. His EAS Tool works wonderfully, makes properly and objectively testing for increase aggression possible, and is the measure by which Patricia development progressed. He was also very invested in Patricia's development and explained many features of the EAS tool to me so that I had a better understanding of what was a sacrifice and what wasn't. He has put a lot of time into quantifying style, and I am happy to have Patricia be a proof-of-concept and culmination of his ideas.
Thanks to my friends at SweHosting as usual, for being supportive, for suggesting ideas, and for spreading Patricia propaganda in the Stockfish Discord server.
Thanks to all the people interested in an aggressive chess engine. The support I got in my developer log on Talkchess is really nice to see. I'm glad people care about style in chess too, rather than just ELO!
Instructions for downloading/building Patricia can be found in the Releases section. If you know UCI protocol, you can run Patricia directly, otherwise she will work with any major GUI (Arena, BanksiaGUI, etc.)
If you think Patricia is a cool project, please spread the word! There are lots of people interested in an aggressive engine, whether it be for sparring or for analysis, and greater awareness of the undisputed queen of style would make their wish come true.