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Subject: Timing strategies, was Re: Alpha beta window shown on screen

Author: David Eppstein

Date: 20:02:49 11/09/97

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On November 09, 1997 at 17:04:11, Robert Hyatt wrote:
> Crafty has *always* done this.  Right before the "depth time ... " heading,
> you see a "target time: " line.  This is the anticipated search time for
> this move, assuming the bottom doesn't fall out right at the end.  [snip]
> for normal moves, the "target" is within 1 second of how long it will take...

You must cut the search in the middle of a ply, if you can predict so
precisely how long it will take.  Does this distort the search results
much? Do you get much useful information from the time you spend after
the last full ply?

I've been playing with a timing strategy that involves two time bounds
T1 and T2.  If a ply finishes after time T1, I stop instead of going on
to the next ply.  If I get to time T2 without having stopped, I abort
the search. This way the search result is usually a search of a complete
ply rather than all of one ply and part of the next. But this is just
for a program I wrote as a web applet, I haven't tried this in a real
timed game, so I'm not sure whether it's a good idea.

Also this way my program naturally allocates more time to some moves
than others, which most people seem to think would be a good idea if you
knew how; I'm not sure if the moves it's allocating more time to are the
ones that need the extra time, though.
--
David Eppstein          UC Irvine Dept. of Information & Computer
Science
eppstein@ics.uci.edu    http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/



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