Gull 3 is superb, and very clean original code (the sources consist of just ONE file!), and his playing strength is very high. It's a pity that the developer decided to put the project on deep freeze...
Stockfish 6 slow at an easy tactic?
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Nov 6, 2015
0
#23
In today's world of countless engine clones Gull is like a breath of fresh air. I use Chessbase's Let's Check on the daily basis, and quite often Stockfish and Komodo's principal variations match move-for-move 10+ plies deep. Gull will often offer a different POV. And it even can analyze an endgame reasonably without tablebases (no support for it), unlike the other two.
A pity indeed.
Never heard about Gull before. It could of been one of the best engines..
Nov 6, 2015
0
#25
Quite a few of the lower tier engines on my PC found the move within several seconds. Those engines probably aren't doing the severe pruning that the newer engines are doing.
All on one thread
About 3 sec, unless otherwise noted
Anmon 5.75
Beowulf 2.4 (6 sec)
Cheng4 0.36 x64
Critter 1.6a x64
Delfi Trainer 5.4 (almost instantly)
Dragon 4.6 (5 sec)
HIARCS 13.2 (7 sec)
Houdini 1.5a x64
Mephisto Gideon Professional UCI (almost instantly)
Naum 4.6 x64 (5 sec)
Nejmet 3.07 (8 sec)
Pro Deo 1.87
Quark 2.35 (11 sec)
Rebel 6.0 UCI
Rebel Century 2000 UCI (almost instantly)
Ufim 8.02 (8 sec)
Yace 0.99.87 (almost instantly)
Zchess 2.00 London
On this 7-year old 3GHz Core 2 Duo desktop the official Stockfish 6 finds 1...Ng3+ at depth 25 in 35 seconds.
SF doesn't offer the "turn pruning off" option like Komodo does. Recent dev builds (Oct 25 and later) use a different algorithm that does less pruning at the cost of depth. E.g. the Nov 4 build finds 1...Ng3+ at d=23 in the same 35 seconds. You would see a significant time difference on a more modern machine with more cores (6+), though.
There's also a fork of Stockfish 6 advertized as a "Version for analysis mode" - DeepFishMZ, it apparently uses no pruning at all and in speed is comparable to Rybka. This one finds 1...Ng3+ at d=14 in about 11 seconds.
To compare, Gull 3 finds it in one second at d=12. That's an engine that hasn't been updated since April 2014 but beat SF in the current engine tournament a couple of times - go figure.