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Subject: Re: Computer Correspondence Chess Challenge..... But

Author: Jeremiah Penery

Date: 12:48:21 04/03/00

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On April 03, 2000 at 15:37:29, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On April 03, 2000 at 15:28:51, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>
>>On April 03, 2000 at 08:57:27, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On April 02, 2000 at 22:39:06, Tina Long wrote:
>>>
>>>>I am suggesting that "If the "score" of the best 3 moves is not too dissimilar"
>>>>increasing the analysis time from about 40min to 4 hours for 2nd & 3rd best May
>>>>find one of them to be actually Best.  This is the Benefit to weigh against the
>>>>Cost of the 1st best move being analysed to 19 ply rather than 20 ply.
>>>
>>>
>>>This is the same thing as adding 2+2, but then going over and over the result,
>>>checking yourself, for the next hour.  Is your answer any more accurate?  Or
>>>did you just spend a lot of time?
>>>
>>>If the second move was searched deeper, that would be different.  But _all_
>>>moves are searched to the same base depth.
>>
>>One thing (probably of many) that can mess this up a bit is null-move pruning.
>>Take WAC #141 for example (the Queen sac for mate) - Pretend that Qxf4 is the
>>second move on your list, and so would show up that way in k-best mode.  If you
>>do a normal search, it might take 10 plies to see that Qxf4 is best.  However,
>>if you do K-best, you'd see at ply 8 that Qxf4 actually has a higher score.
>>
>>I've seen similar things happen tons of times with Crafty.  It finds move X
>>after a normal search to some depth, but when you force it to search some other
>>move, it can find a higher score at the same depth - Why didn't it find the
>>'better' move the first time?  But K-best will find it, most likely.
>>
>>I'm not arguing for K-best to be used in any serious game(s), or that it is any
>>better than normal search.  I'm just pointing out that in some cases, it can
>>actually produce something better, due to the imperfections in pruning methods
>>and such.
>>
>>Jeremiah
>
>
>No doubt.  But how many real positions do you search, vs positions where a
>queen sac wins?  Best to put your money on the cases you expect to see most
>often?

The queen sac was an extreme example.  The sac of any material will often
produce the same problem.  In many other cases I've seen the score for a
'non-best' move be only 0.01 above the 'best' move.  I'm not quite sure what
this means, but it happens frequently.  At least frequently enough to be fairly
noticable. :)

Jeremiah



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