Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: why do computers waste time about forced moves?

Author: blass uri

Date: 03:03:55 05/16/98

Go up one level in this thread



On May 15, 1998 at 18:26:47, Edward Screven wrote:

>On May 15, 1998 at 05:56:35, Harald Faber wrote:
>
>>AFAIK it is because the programs also profit from the permanent brain.
>>So if the program makes a forced move at depth=3 it may consider a
>>really bad move to be played next by the opponent and wastes time
>>finding the best answer to that move. So it is more senseful to let a
>>program think a little longer so that the chance is higher to see the
>>opponent's next move.
>
>having a better guess for "permanent brain" searching helps make
>the time spent searching for a forced move a little less wasted,
>but i don't think it's the reason why it happens -- certainly not
>for my own program.
>
>the real problem is how sure do you want to be that the obvious
>move is actually forced?  if you spend too little time searching
>it what looks like a forced position, you might miss a good
>not-so-obvious move, or you might not see that capturing that
>pawn leads to dropping a piece.
>
>my approach to this is to use the notion of singularity to decide
>if a move is forced when replying to a check, capture, or
>promotion.  basically, on the first iteration after searching
>at least 1/12 of the time i would otherwise allocate, i try to
>prove that all non-pv moves are more than some threshold worse
>than the pv move.  if the answer is affirmative, then i search
>the pv one ply deeper.  if i don't fall off of a cliff, then i
>end the search.
I do not understand why  to waste at least 1/12
of the time... if the second best move give the opponent the possibility
to do checkmate.
usually this is not the case
but you do not waste a lot of time to  identify cases like that
if you only check the possibility to do mate in 1 or 2(less than 0.1
second
per move).
and in the average you save time.
>
>this has proven relatively safe, and often does save time.
>before i added the "cliff" check i saved more time, but i
>also found a few cases of cutting searches short too soon,
>with disasterous results.
>
>it's not too expensive, because if the steps of the proof
>are similar to normal root search steps, so proof failures
>leave the root search close to where it would have been
>anyway.
>
>    - edward



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.