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Subject: Re: MVVLVA sorting does not help for move ordering

Author: Sune Fischer

Date: 10:17:15 09/21/02

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On September 21, 2002 at 12:20:24, scott farrell wrote:

>I was just fiddling with my move ordering (as we all do from time to time).
>
>I found that my MVVLVA code worsened (is that a word?) my move ordering, and
>slow my searches significantly.
>
>I altered it to just simply ordering the capture by the size of the material it
>is to take, disregarding the size of the piece to perform the capture.
>
>As far as I know current wisdom for move ordering is something like this:
>1. from hastable first
>2. killers next
>3. winning captures ordered by MVVLVA
>4. other moves
>5. losing captures
>
>My updated move ordering is:
>1. from hastable first
>2. killers next
>3. all captures, ordered by the size of the captured piece (largest first), and
>ties broken by size of attacker only
>4. other moves
>5. losing captures

I disagree with conventional wisdom then, I hardly ever get a cutoff on the
non-captures & non-killers, but maybe I have a bug or something.

Here is a bit of statistics.

Type of move / % of these moves in search / % cutoffs by these moves:
hash.......: 0.44% 93.35%
null.......: 27.91% 76.20%
wcap.......: 3.39% 67.11%
ecap.......: 0.45% 60.75%
lcap.......: 3.87% 22.38%
kill.......: 3.10% 22.34%
ncap.......: 60.84% 0.50%

(only the first column should sum to 1).

As you can see even the losing captures produce relative more cutoffs than
non-captures (excl. the killers), it is debatable if killers should go before
losing captures by these stats, it's probably worth a try.

I use two killers and sort captures by SEE, but I do suspect there is a bug
(winning captures are not a lot better than equal captures?).

I get only a 90% move ordering with this scheme, and I'm not counting nullmoves
since those are not real moves, nor do I (obviously not) count transpositional
or draw cuts, so I think I'm counting 'correctly'.

-S.




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