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Subject: Re: A pondering idea... [a more clear {hopefully} example]

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 20:44:19 09/27/01

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On September 27, 2001 at 19:05:43, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On September 27, 2001 at 17:48:32, Peter Fendrich wrote:
>[snip]
>>Yes, I buy all that. My intention was to oppose to the "it's impossible"
>>statement. You are talking about some general case. There is no reason why each
>>move has to be 20% because the first one is. That's why I'm talking about
>>isolating cases where the other move might be better. Another question is what
>>happens if the ponder move has only 10% or 5% probability.
>>I have no proofs that these cases are possible to identify but I'm still open
>>for it, until I know better...
>
>Also, it does not have to be either/or.
>
>We could ponder the root for 1/2 of the extrapolated opponent time slice, and at
>that point, change to the pm and ponder that.
>
>It seems to me that there are many possibilities.
>
>Something that is puzzling me...
>If one move is really much better than the others, then we would think that it
>would fail high, re-search, and gobble most of the time anyway.  If that does
>not happen, then some of the alternatives must be pretty good.
>
>So, why does pondering root yield only a 2% gain, and pondering the pm give an
>enormous one?
>
>It still does not make sense to me.
>
>I guess I'm just having a hard time understanding why it is so much better to
>ponder the pm instead of the root.

If by "root" you mean the position _before_ any opponent move, then the reason
is obvious...  you will spread your time over N moves, which means that when
the opponent moves, you will have looked at the _right_ move only 1/N of the
time.  You still have a long time to search to meet the target time for this
search.



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