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Subject: Re: Fractional Ply reductions for Null Move?

Author: Dan Newman

Date: 15:12:19 03/30/00

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On March 30, 2000 at 11:04:01, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On March 30, 2000 at 07:57:12, Bruce Cleaver wrote:
>
>>All -
>>
>>Has anyone experimented with dynamically adjusting R for nullmove reduction?
>>The idea is that some positions deserve R = 1, others R = 2, maybe some even
>>deserve R = 3, if your stomach is strong enough.  The value of R could be based
>>either on the distance from Beta, or on other factors (as used in fractional ply
>>extensions).
>>
>>Perhaps this could save search time or boost confidence that you aren't missing
>>deep tactics with a static R value.
>>
>> If it has been tried before , and found wanting, well then obviously some
>>imposter hijacked my email ID and posted this message....     :^)
>>
>>
>>Bruce
>
>
>It has been done (and is still being done.)  I have been doing it for well over
>a year.  Ernst wrote a paper describing how he implemented the same idea (we
>apparently tried the same idea independently and liked the results although I
>am not sure we are doing it in identical ways).
>
>I have been using R=3 near the root and R=2 near the leaves for a long while.
>I have had the idea on my 'todo list" for trying continuous values rather than
>discrete values, since I already do fractional plies.  IE R=3 near the root
>tapering to R=2 near the leaves, but maybe R=2.5 in the middle, roughly.

I do fractional null-move reductions in Shrike (ever since I read about the
variable reductions here).  I'm not sure how well it works though.  I don't
think it improved my testsuite results much...

What I do is fill out an array with R values to be indexed by the depth (which,
since it's fractional, I shift down a bit to allow the R array to be smaller).
Currently I start out at three, shift to two and a half, then two, and finally
one ply.  I may try something finer grained, but this idea creates a really
huge parameter space to explore...

-Dan.



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