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Subject: Re: Speaking of the Thesis by Marcel van Kervinck (hopefully no storms)...

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 13:15:25 09/06/02

Go up one level in this thread


On September 06, 2002 at 16:06:43, Tony Werten wrote:

>On September 06, 2002 at 16:03:06, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On September 06, 2002 at 15:46:53, Tony Werten wrote:
>>
>>>On September 06, 2002 at 14:45:11, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>>
>>>>Did anyone notice his cutoff idea in the evaluation function?
>>>>
>>>>It seems to me to be a very good idea, and I don't know if others have tried it
>>>>out.
>>>>
>>>>Basically, it consists of three modes with two early exits...
>>>>
>>>>1. If the material + structure score alone is dominant enough, it exits right
>>>>away.
>>>>2. Otherwise, it processes the piece list.  If that score is dominant, it exits.
>>>>3. Otherwise, it does a full board control scan for all 64 squares.
>>>>
>>>>It is described starting on page 62 under the section "3.3.2 Multi Staged
>>>>Design"
>>>>He gets roughly 71% evals returning in stage #1, 13% in stage #2 and 7% in stage
>>>>#3.
>>>>
>>>>It seems like it might be a big win to do it that way.
>>>
>>>It's called lazy eval and is not a good idea. The times it is wrong happen to be
>>>the important ones.
>>>
>>>Tony
>>
>>
>>Two things...
>>
>>First, you _can_ do a lazy eval with zero error.  I did it in Cray Blitz and
>>I explained the idea here before...
>>
>>You can compute the possible "positional error" (the amount the score will
>>change max and min) for each type of piece.  When you do a lazy eval, you
>>can use this min/max and sum 'em up (or do it incrementally as we did, which
>>can be a headache) so that you know the "independent piece max/min scores".
>>
>>If you lazy eval based on that, you get _zero_ errors because you will _really_
>>know that the individual piece scores can't produce a number larger than X or
>>smaller than Y, so you can make an informed decision.
>>
>>I don't do that today because each time you change the eval, you have to
>>update those min/max values which is something I would continually forget.
>
>Yes, correct. But when you get 71% hitrate your bounds are not very wide.
>
>>
>>2.  You can get good results with remembering the min/max positional scores
>>during a real game.  yes, the scores will continue to "widen" and reduce lazy
>>eval exits, but the error rate is not that bad.  Compared to the cost.
>
>In XiniX the hitrate drops to <5% quite fast this way. IMO not really worth it.
>
>Tony


I don't see it drop that far, but I don't watch it carefully unless I am
suspecting trouble either...  I will take a longer look.



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