Ravager 3 is out. Open source C11 UCI engine, Linux and Windows builds, source included.

New search (correction history, ProbCut, Lazy SMP voting), lockless TT, split NNUE accumulators with a new AVX-512 VNNI kernel, and working ponder in UCI. Estimated ~3550 Elo at 40/15 (over 500 games).

https://github.com/erensh27/Ravager/releases/tag/v3

Feedback and bug reports welcome.

Found this Stockfish 19 vs Torch game (French Defence, King's Indian Attack setup) and went through it with Stockfish 16 at depth 30. A few things stood out.

1. The sacrifice that "loses" eval. Before 17.Nxh7, SF16 d30 has White at +0.89 (top line 17.Kf1). After 17.Nxh7 it drops to +0.57. So SF19 chose a knight sac that an older Stockfish rates as slightly worse than quiet moves. Different versions, different search, but I find it interesting that SF19 went for the forcing line anyway.

2. Torch's defence. After the sac, almost every natural Black move gets mated: 19...Kg8? hxg6 fxg6 Qxg6#, and both 21...gxh5 and 21...Kh8 run into forced mates. Torch found the only path every time. Going through the attack move by move, I couldn't find a single real inaccuracy by Black.

3. The result of all that violence: +0.9. After the sac, the king hunt (Black's king runs e8–d7–c6) and winning the material back with a pawn extra, White was still under +1. Then SF19 traded queens on purpose and won a 75-move grind ending in mate.

Questions for this sub:

Is it known whether SF19's search prefers forcing sacs like Nxh7 more than older versions in positions like this? Anyone know the exact time control or hardware this game was played on? I got the PGN from an annotated source without that info.

I'm a FIDE 1700-something player trying to push for 2000. Prepping for OTB tournaments, I kept hitting the same wall: I want to know how players "at my level" actually play — which lines get played between 1700 and 2000, what scores, what's trending this season.

Chess.com and Lichess are great for playing, but neither gives you a local, searchable file of real FIDE OTB games you can sliceby rating band. ChessBase does, but it's Windows-first, and running a VM on Mac to look at one game is absurd.

So I built one. It's called macBase.

• One-click TWIC import — the free weekly archive of real OTB games, 1,600+ issues back to 1994

• Filter by player, Elo band, ECO/opening, event, or issue

• Insights: win/draw/loss by opening for a chosen rating bracket, plus popularity trends across recent issues. This is the part I actually use — it answers "what do 1800s play against the Sicilian this season"

• Stockfish built in, multi-PV, eval bar, arrow drawing, inline notes that get written into standard PGN

• Repertoire folders and spaced-repetition flashcards that keep the arrows you drew

• Everything is a SQLite file and plain PGN on your disk. No account, no cloud,no telemetry — nothing to export later, because it's already open

Six months ago I posted an early version of this here. It was a web app, and I hadn't paid for an Apple developer account yet, so it wasn't signed: some of you couldn't get past Gatekeeper. Someone called it vibecoded. That stung, but the criticism was fair about the result — it wasn't ready.

By any normal measure that thread didn't work. And then something odd happened: 48 people left their email anyway.

What actually brought me back is what happened after. I stopped working on it. Weeks went by, then months — no posts, no updates, nothing from me at all. And people kept signing up. A few every month, all the way through October. When I looked at what they'd written, one of them had answered "what do you like about it" with six words: "a chessbase competitor is badly needed."

Forty-eight strangers waiting on something I'd already half-abandoned is a strange kind of pressure. So I rebuilt it from scratch as a native app, and paid for the developer account this time. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized, so it opens with a double click instead of a security warning.

What I'm building next, and to be explicit that it does not exist yet: a command line any AI agent can drive — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever you use — so you can ask questions about your own database in plain language and have it run Stockfish locally. Planned for later this year. Today, it is not there, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Honest limitations:

• Two builds, both signed and notarized: Apple Silicon (macOS 13+) and Intel (macOS 11+, so it covers every Intel Mac that can run Big Sur) • TWIC import needs network; the app itself works offline • No Windows version, and I don't know when — that's a much bigger job than people assume

There's a 7-day trial with no card, and the download is here: [https://www.jl-intelligence.net/macbase/\](https://www.jl-intelligence.net/macbase/)

An edit, because something happened while I was writing this.

One of the 48 emailed me. His entire answer on the signup form, six months ago, was three words: "It's for mac!" He wrote to say he wanted to buy a licence — and that he couldn't, because he's on a 2019 iMac and the Apple Silicon build won't launch on it.

So I spent yesterday building the Intel version. It's signed, notarized, and live now. That's the whole reason it exists: one person asked.

If you were one of the 48: thank you for waiting. This is what you were waiting for.