Wasp

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Wasp, John Stanback's new UCI compliant chess engine and complete rewrite of Zarkov, first released short after June solstice 2016, announced and hosted by Frank Quisinsky. As a bitboard engine, Wasp is compiled for modern 64 bit CPU's with popcnt and bitscan instructions. Wasp 2.00, released in April 2017, is able to use multiple threads performing a Lazy SMP search. In 2020, John Stanback played with tiny neural networks to learn how to backpropagate errors using Wasp's evaluation as the target, and then rewrote Wasp's evaluation function with fast tuning in mind, quite similar to the tiny NN approach. Along with Wasp 5.0, released in November 2021, the evaluation function emerged to an NNUE with 1830 inputs, 192 neurons in the first hidden layer, 16 neurons in the second hidden layer, and two neurons in the third hidden layer. It was trained using positions from games between Wasp and other engines of roughly similar strength.

=Features=

Search

 * Iterative Deepening
 * Aspiration Windows
 * Principal Variation Search
 * Transposition Table
 * Extensions
 * Check Extensions
 * Passed Pawn Extensions (to 7th rank if depth is low)
 * Fractional
 * Capture Extensions
 * PV Extensions
 * Pruning/Reductions
 * Quiescence Search
 * Null Move Pruning
 * Futility Pruning
 * Reverse Futility Pruning
 * Late Move Pruning
 * Late Move Reductions
 * Move Ordering
 * Killer Heuristic
 * History Heuristic
 * Internal Iterative Deepening
 * MVV/LVA
 * Static Exchange Evaluation
 * Lazy SMP (Wasp 2.00)

Evaluation

 * NNUE (Wasp 5.0)
 * Wasp does not use Lazy Evaluation (Opposed to Zarkov)
 * Tapered Eval
 * Material
 * Piece-Square Tables
 * Evaluation Hash Table
 * Pawn Hash Table
 * Pawn Structure
 * Passed Pawn
 * Candidate Passed Pawn
 * Weak Pawns
 * Backward Pawn
 * Doubled Pawn
 * Isolated Pawn
 * Mobility
 * Trapped Pieces
 * Outposts
 * Rook on open/half-open file
 * Rook on Seventh
 * King Safety
 * King Pawn Tropism in Endgame

Misc

 * KPK base
 * UCI

=See also=
 * Arthropod
 * Buzz
 * GNU Chess
 * SCP
 * Zarkov

=Forum Posts=

2016 ...
2017 2018 2019
 * Wasp 1.01 x64 by John Stanback released ... by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, June 22, 2016
 * Wasp 1.02 by John Stanback available ... by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, July 01, 2016
 * Wasp until move 42... by Fernando Villegas, CCC, July 05, 2016
 * Wasp by John Stanback is clear for take-off on runway 1.25! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, September 30, 2016
 * Wasp 2.00 by John Stanback ... with Lazy SMP! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, April 21, 2017
 * Wasp 2.01 by John Stanback available ... by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, May 04, 2017
 * Re: Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) scaling - SF8 and K10.4 by John Stanback, CCC, May 06, 2017 » Lazy SMP
 * Wasp 2.60 by John Stanback released! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, November 22, 2017
 * Wasp and a question by Fernando Villegas, CCC, November 23, 2017
 * Wasp 3.00 available ... by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, May 11, 2018
 * Re: Lazy SMP and 44 cores by John Stanback, CCC, August 08, 2018 » Lazy SMP
 * Wasp 3.50 by John Stanback available! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, December 14, 2018
 * Wasp 3.60 available (for DGT Pi too, for chess computer lovers) by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, April 07, 2019 » DGT Pi
 * Wasp 3.75 by John Stanback released ... by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, September 06, 2019

2020 ...

 * Wasp 4.00 by John Stanback available! by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, June 14, 2020
 * Wasp NN by Ted Summers, CCC, November 14, 2020
 * Re: Wasp NN by John Stanback, CCC, November 14, 2020

2021
 * Wasp 4.08 dev by Frank Quisinsky, CCC, November 22, 2020
 * Wasp 4.5 Released by John Stanback, CCC, January 01, 2021
 * Wasp 5.00 released by John Stanback, CCC, November 18, 2021

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * Frank's Chess Page, Wasp by John Stanback
 * Wasp in CCRL 40/15

Misc

 * WASP - Wiktionary
 * wasp - Wiktionary
 * Wasp from Wikipedia
 * Wasp (disambiguation) from Wikipedia
 * W.A.S.P. - Mantronic, Inside the Electric Circus (1986), YouTube Video

=References=

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