chess4j can now ponder! If you’re not familiar with that term, it means that the program will make use of the time the opponent is on move. It does this by predicting the move the opponent will make, and thinking about what its response will be.

Let’s say that the program would spend X seconds formulating its response. The opponent makes its move in Y seconds, and it makes the predicted move. If X <= Y, the program can move instantly. If X > Y, then the program only needs to spend X-Y more seconds. If, however, the program did not correctly predict the opponent’s move, it will need to throw out the work and start over.

There are other ways to implement pondering. One variation is for the engine to start thinking about what it would do if it were the opponent. The idea is that when the opponent does move, the hash tables will be full of good information that should make the search move along very quickly. It’s hard to see how this can be more effective than the “guess” approach though, assuming the prediction rate is fairly good. A 50% prediction rate is completely reasonable. That’s a lot of the opponent time being utilized by the engine.

So how many ELO is pondering worth? Conventional wisdom is that a doubling of speed is worth around 70 ELO, so that should serve as an upper bound (effectively using 100% of the opponent’s time would conceptually be equivalent to a doubling of time). If we effectively use about 50% of the opponent’s time, I would expect a 30-40 ELO boost.

I ran some tests, chess4j with pondering vs without pondering. This was mainly a stability test; I wouldn’t put too much stock in the results as the prediction rate against itself will obviously be a lot higher than it would against another opponent. Still, the results are interesting.

With Pondering	Without Pondering	Draw	Rate
1010	651	339	0.670

Clearly pondering is a big advantage.

Analysis mode is also supported now, meaning it’s possible to analyze games or just try different moves to see the engine’s “opinion” of each. Make a move, let the engine think for a while, back up and try another move, etc.

One final note: Pondering and Analysis mode are not supported in Prophet directly, but they are supported by chess4j when using Prophet. This highlights the benefit of the JNI integration – keep the native engine “lean and clean” and implement the ancillary functions in the high level language.

Now, onto a quiescence search.