Fetch GitHub repository commit, release, and workflow artifact information.
Options
-h, –help • show this help message and exit -v, –verbose • Enable verbose output. -ver, –version • Display script version. -ro REPO_OWNER, –repo-owner REPO_OWNER • Owner of the GitHub repository. -re REPO, –repo REPO • Name of the GitHub repository.
Aligned with Stockfish patch: Jan 12, 2025 (Increase the depth margin). The AI recognized the significant added value and originality of the derivative ShashChess compared to the original Stockfish. For further details and the great novelties of this version, see this pdf document.
Calvin 5.1.0 brings significant improvements in both search and evaluation. Calvin has a bigger and better neural network, with a hidden layer size of 1024 and 4 king buckets, horizontally mirrored. In search, the biggest improvement was fixing Calvin’s bugged SEE algorithm, which enabled many search and move ordering techniques. Tests against the previous release suggest a strength increase of 124 elo LTC / 106 elo STC.
To run the jar file, you will need to enable the Vector API package which Calvin uses for SIMD, via this command:
Still not totally convinced this is finished, since it took such a long time. I started with the 2025-01 FIDE XML players list, culled it with a ChatGPT-generated Python script so that only players rated 2000+ were included. Then converted that to XLSX (amongst other formats) and copied out the column in that spreadsheet for the FIDE IDs of those players. Then, with another Python script, I was able to download a JSON file for each player from the FIDE API, using a wrapper from a GitHub repository. These JSON files have all the information for those players. Not just general information, but the ratings and number of games for every month that they have a rating for. So these files turned out to be pretty long. The next step was converting all of those to a new XML players list, which includes all the history, as well as the general information. Even though the number of players is drastically reduced to only a bit more than 19,000, still the new XML players list is about twice the size of the old one. I did make sure to streamline the elements, so that, as much as possible, they resemble the elements in the regular players list.
The size of the ZIP is about 40 MB, and oddly the size of the XML file is about 1.2 GB. I’m not sure how it compressed so well, but it seems to have done so.
Doubles and non-standard games are removed. Everything here qualifies in ChessBase as a strong game, i.e. at least 10 moves, and with ratings 2300+. Openings, evaluations, beauty scores, and novelty annotations are added.
The player’s list is provided with each month, but not provided in the archives for previous months. While it would be somewhat useful to have an archive of them, there’s no reliable way to build it. However, all three lists are provided as XML, which can be combined with a script. So, using a Python script written by ChatGPT, I’m able to create combined XML files which don’t contain the inactive players, but nonetheless could easily stand in for the player’s list. And these can be provided for every month that there are XML files. Here is December 2024.
I’ve made many attempts now to create the perfect Python script for SF commits (via ChatGPT, of course), and finally realized that the problem was that almost everything necessary is already at Abrok. Official builds are over at the official site anyway. But all the commits are here, going back to 2018 or so. Here is a list of those commits, with direct links to the executables.
Original Millionbase, from the old Rebel website, cleaned up in ChessBase and Scid, with most of the work handled by pgn-extract. Headers are normalized, evaluations and openings are added, along with plycount and beauty scores.
Working with files is a big part of being a chess engine enthusiast. Here are a few commands that will help.
First a couple that don’t involve the Windows PowerShell.
You may be familiar with how you can use CTRL+V to paste the latest addition to the clipboard. But you can also use WIN+V to open a list of the last ten things you put on the clipboard, and you can use the mouse to choose which one. This means if you need to copy and paste three things, you can use CTRL+C on all three, then WIN+V to select them each.
If you want to combine all the PGNs in a directory (for example) you would click to the right of the path in the Windows Explorer address bar, and type in cmd to replace it. This brings up the Command Prompt, in which you type copy *pgn filename.pgn …. though of course you would use your own filename.
That same Command Prompt copy command can be run in the PowerShell as well:
That last command takes all the files in a directory, as before, and puts them all together. Each time you run this, you would overwrite the output file. To append to it instead, use:
Having used a Python script to make a list of player names from the Online Superelite DB, I then used another script to attempt to download the Nov. 2020 games from each of those players, ending up with about 2,000 PGNs. After running them through pgn-extract with the same filters used for the rest of the Online Superelite DB, this was the result. These games have players rated at least 2500. Games are between 20-150 moves, and end in checkmate. Doubles, bullet games, and non-standard games have been removed.
