Ceres ("Chess Engine for Research") is:
The Ceres MCTS engine is a novel implementation written in C# for the Microsoft .NET framework. This system comprises about 80,000 lines of source in 500 source code files, developed as a way to try to make something good come of COVID confinement. The underlying neural networks (and backend code to execute them) and backend code are currently mostly borrowed from the LeelaChessZero project via a "plug-in" architecture.
It is important to acknowledge that this project stands "on the shoulders of giants" - the pioneers in the field such as DeepMind with their AlphaZero project and the ongoing Leela Chess Zero project. In some cases significant sections of code are largely based upon (transliterated from) other open source projects such as Fathom (for tablebase access) or Leela Chess Zero (CUDA backend logic).
Although several fine open source implementations of MCTS engines are currently available, this project is hoped to provide several important benefits:
Ceres was first released at the end of 2020 is still relatively early in its development. Support for the neural network backend is current limited to CUDA-capable GPUs.
During 2020 numerous significant enhancments were made, including:
Ceres playing strength is currently competitive with top chess engines such as Leela Chess Zero and Stockfish, depending of course considerably upon the particular types of hardware (CPU and GPU) available for each engine.
The Ceres architecture is object oriented and organized into five layers:
The class library is intended to be reusable and offer comprehensive chess functionality to facilitate research, for example including:
The external API is not yet considered stable. Future effort will result in the publication of documentation and more extensive code samples of the API, along with an overview of the underlying data structures and algorithms.
As a teaser, the following examples demonstrate how the API can be leveraged to perform complex tasks using only a very small number of lines of code.
Numerous small to medium-sized features are believed to combine to help deliver strong performance of both search speed and play quality, including:
A novel "dual CPUCT node selection algorithm" is used which alternates between two CPUCT levels (centered around the target CPUCT) on each batch, thereby minimizing collisions (and allowing larger batches) in selected leafs and combining elements of greater breadth and depth simultaneously for improved play quality (suggested earlier by LC0 contributor Naphthalin).
MCTS leaf selection is highly parallelized in an almost lock-free way, with only a single descent and each visited node being visited at most once.
MCTS leaf selection via PUCT algorithm is accelerated via SIMD hardware intrinsics (AVX), which is made feasible by the above-mentioned parallelized descent algorithm.
An overlapping execution approach allows efficient concurrent gathering and evaluation of batches.
A relative virtual loss technique is used rather than absolute (to reduce the magnitude of distortions caused by node selection with virtual loss applied).
The underlying search tree nodes are represented as fixed-size memory objects which are cache-aligned and reserved up front by dynamically committed only as needed. This structure enhances performance and facilitates efficient serialization of search tree state. The data structures use 32-bit node indices instead of 64-bit pointers to reduce memory consumption and make one-shot binary serialization possible. A set of "annotations" are maintained for a cached subset of active nodes, containing derived information useful in search.
Transpositions are detected and short-circuited from needing neural network re-evaluation by copying the neural networks from the nodes already "in situ" in the tree (thereby obviating explicit transposition tables or any limit on their size). A "virtual subtree" techinque is used to avoid instantiating subtrees which are already transpositions until they exceed 3 nodes in size, thereby improving efficiency and reducing memory requirements.
Best move selection is often based on Q (subtree average evaluation) instead of N (number of visits). Among other benefits, this opens the door to search methods more tuned to BAI (best arm identification) at the root.
A "sibling blending" technique sometimes averages in information to newly visited nodes from their siblings which have not yet been evaluated in the subtree but have already been evaluated in other branches of the tree (i.e. are transpositions) thereby taking further advantage of the substantial information captured in the full memory-resident search tree.
An "uncertainty boosting" technique slightly incentivizes exploration at nodes with high uncertainty (historical variability of backed-up node evaluationss), in the spirit of the UCB algorithm's optimism (more variability might signal more potential upside, and/or indicates that the marginal information gain of further visits is higher).
Extensive use is made of fairly fine-grained parallelism to speed up many operations, using the .NET Thread Parallel Library (TPL) for covenience and high efficiency.
Critical components of the engine have been extensively optimized with the help of tools such as Intel vTune and careful attention to processor details such as memory alignment, false sharing, NUMA effects, locking primitives, prefetching, branch prediction, and maximizing instruction-level parallelism.
The neural network evaluator framework is extensible with current implementations provided for random, CUDA using Leela Chess Zeronetworks, and an experimental NVIDIA Tensor RT backend accepting ONNX network files, facilitating experimentation with alternate network architectures or inference precisions (8 bit).
The setup instructions describe the sequence of steps currently needed to install and configure Ceres. Although installation procedures have been simplified since since first release, the process is not yet "single-click" easy and does require several steps and careful attention.
As is typical of chess engines, no GUI is directly provided. Instead users typically use GUI front-ends such as Arena, or the excellent Nibbler (https://github.com/rooklift/nibbler/releases) GUI which is optimized for MCTS-style engine such as Ceres or Leela Chess Zero.
Event logging and statistics collection are very useful (and interesting) tools. Ceres provides an optional realtime monitoring system.
It is hoped that Ceres will be a community effort. At this early stage, it probably does not make sense to be soliciting a large number of small improvements. Instead it is suggested that contributions would be most useful in the following areas:
Somewhat bigger picture, thoughts and help with the architecture and implementation of backends would be especially welcomed. In particular, it is hoped to eventually generalize the interface between LC0 backends and arbitrary clients so this large and complex set of backends could be more widely leveraged by other chess engines including Ceres.
It goes without saying that Ceres builds on the work of many other researchers and software developers, most notably:
Ceres is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 or later of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Ceres is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Leela Chess. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
The source files of Ceres have the following additional permission, as allowed under GNU GPL version 3 section 7:
If you modify this Program, or any covered work, by linking or combining it with NVIDIA Corporation's libraries from the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit and the NVIDIA CUDA Deep Neural Network library (or a modified version of those libraries), containing parts covered by the terms of the respective license agreement, the licensors of this Program grant you additional permission to convey the resulting work.