Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Branching factor, etc

Author: Ralf Elvsén

Date: 12:40:40 08/31/02

Go up one level in this thread


On August 31, 2002 at 14:02:14, Omid David wrote:

>On August 31, 2002 at 13:55:41, Uri Blass wrote:
>
>>On August 31, 2002 at 11:11:50, Ralf Elvsén wrote:
>>
>>>On August 31, 2002 at 05:34:11, Uri Blass wrote:
>>>
>>>>On August 31, 2002 at 04:51:49, Ralf Elvsén wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On August 30, 2002 at 23:00:30, Andreas Herrmann wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On August 30, 2002 at 21:03:25, Uri Blass wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>I know this :-)
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>But there is the odd/even issue, so the b-factor can change drastically while
>>>>>>>>>moving from an odd ply to an even ply, and vice versa.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>I think the best is to calculate an average branching factor from all plys.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>bf[avg] = ( bf[2] + bf[3] + bf[4] ... + bf[n] ) / (n - 1)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Andreas
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>It is better to use
>>>>>>>( bf[2] * bf[3] * bf[4] ... * bf[n] )^(1/(n-1))
>>>>>
>>>>>Not if the numbers bf[i] are ratios of the type bf[i] = T[i]/T[i-1] (e.g.)
>>>>>Then everything will cancel out except for the first and last T[i]
>>>>
>>>>I think that this is exactly the idea about branching factor.
>>>>The question is if I need 1 second to get depth 1 how many seconds I need to get
>>>>depth n.
>>>>
>>>>It is also possible to use the formula (T(n)/T(1))^(1/n-1)
>>>>
>>>>Uri
>>>
>>>
>>>Well, it all depends on what you want. I personally wouldn't like this
>>>measure to depend heavily on T(1) which I would expect to vary much.
>>>And if you have a series for T which is
>>>
>>>T1 = 1 T2 = 2 T3 = 4 T4 = 16 T5 = 64
>>>
>>>and another
>>>
>>>T1 = 1 T2 = 4 T3 = 16 T4 = 32 T5 = 64
>>>
>>>then you have very different branching factors for low/high plies
>>>(relatively speaking) but the proposed formula gives the same
>>>overall value. So you are throwing away information and (in my
>>>opinion) relies heavily on a suspect value: T(1).
>>>
>>>Just my opinion...
>>
>>( bf[2] + bf[3] + bf[4] ... + bf[n] ) / (n - 1) is also the same in both
>>examples so I see no advantage for using that formula.

I never advocated that.

>>
>>You cannot have all information in one number but if n is relatively big the
>>first iterations do not change much.
>>
>>Uri
>
>Once I thought of the following:
>
>Just take all nodes of the last iteration (iteration n), and calculate its
>"n-1"th root:
>
>b-factor = (nodes in iteration n) ^ (1 / (n - 1)).

For practical purpuses I could imagine this: make a little plot of
log (Time[n]) vs n. Fit a straight line and let that determine
the average BF. Then, by eye, one can see if something strange is
going on at various depths.

Ralf



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.