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Subject: Re: Several chess programming questions

Author: Colin Frayn

Date: 09:13:49 04/07/00

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>>No, razoring is when you do futility pruning at the last ply of your full-width
>>search. I think most people don't like it. I tried it and all my test suite
>>scores went way down, even when the futility threshold was pretty conservative.
>>It just causes to the search to miss too much...
>
>I thought that was called "extended futility pruning" and razoring was
>simply reducing the depth of the search by 1 ply if nothing interesting
>was going on near the leaf and the move made does not bring the score
>near alpha.

You are correct.  "Extended futility pruning" is what Tom described, i.e. if the
following condition is met at pre-frontier nodes (depth 2) then prune;

mat_balance(node) + mat_gain(node)+ extd_futil_margin(node) <= alpha
(from Heinz, 1998)

In general, the efm() is about a rook to a rook+pawn.

Razoring similar to what you described, but an enormous material unbalance is
generally required, i.e. a queen's value or more.  The search depth is reduced
by one ply.  This is normally applied at pre-pre-frontier nodes, i.e. depth 3.

I do agree with Tom, though, that in my experience, both these methods, and also
normal futility pruning, vastly reduce tactical accuracy.  I know that Ernst
will disagree, but that's just my experience.

Cheers,
Col



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