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Subject: Re: DB doesn't do NULL move????

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 15:33:36 06/29/98

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On June 29, 1998 at 13:28:31, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On June 29, 1998 at 12:39:13, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>>I am merely stating that it can't be said that null-move is bad just because DB
>>doesn't do it.

>there I'd agree.  They are so much faster/stronger than the rest of us, that
>whether they use null-move or not is probably inconsequential.  I believe that
>null-move would make them even stronger, but Hsu has this "perfection" syndrome
>that refuses to accept any error at all unless it is unavoidable.  With null-
>move, you instantly agree to accept errors, in return for more depth that might
>catch errors you didn't agree to accept.

You have seen where this attitude gets you on a micro, I am sure, and my point
is that once you have learned to jettison this attitude, I don't think you'll
take it back if you get the horsepower again.

>without a doubt correct, although I probably lean a little backward toward Cray
>Blitz now, since parallel processing has boosted my speed enough, I'm now trying
>to find time to investigate things that I found useful in CB, like singular
>extensions, for one example.  I'd like to one day try null-move R=2 on CB, but
>it would be *very* difficult to do since all that stuff is in assembly language.
>But I'd like to know how that affects the thing since I *never* tried it, never
>even tried recursive null-move in fact..

I bet there would be a dramatic improvement.

My feeling is based upon running Ferret with and without null-move during its
evolution.  Null-move is always dramatically better overall on extended tactical
tests.

>they had a lot of pressure from us.  We were never slow, and almost beat them
>the first time we played them, but a cute SMP bug made us avoid a outright
>winning move that they were expecting, and we were going to play, until the
>last minute.
>
>In fact, they never "overwhelmed" us in speed, since they were doing 2-3M nodes
>per second in deep thought II, while we were only doing 1/4 of that or so at
>the time.  As a result, their stick wasn't "that big", only a factor of 4 or
>so.  But other things were certainly working for them in our games, like SE
>for one.

How many times did you play them?

bruce



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