Author: Dezhi Zhao
Date: 01:52:16 06/15/98
In some earlier posts by Don Dailey and others, they mentioned about zero-width window null move search and said it's an efficent way to implement null move search. So I compared the zero-width null move to the original full-width with my Xiangqi (Chinese chess) PVS engine. Here is the results of playing 20 moves (same path for both method, without opening book) from the initial position. The m/c usually searches 2 to 4M nodes for each posoition. If the transposition table is cleared between searches, the savings of zero-width are generally around serveral hundreds of nodes, and the max is 9K for one position. If the transposition table is partially cleared (keep only last iteration entries) between searches, the savings become hard to interpret. You save several hundreds of nodes in a postion, lose that in the following position, and ocassionally lose much more than than previous saving (save 8.4K and lose 140K in the next for example). I think that the savings are negligible, which are caused by the fact that in PVS most of the nodes are of zero-width window already. These results also remind me of the word "vapor-ware" that Dr. Hyatt called NegaScout over PVS. So I checked Crafty 14.13 again, and found that Crafty uses full-width window null move search. Why? My best guess is that Dr. Hyatt has done extensive tests over null move search abnormaly as he mentioned several times in CCC, and found null move search window is related to the abnormaly. Am I right?
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