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Subject: Re: Position from Leiden, Thanks

Author: Gerd Isenberg

Date: 13:00:16 10/31/02

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On October 30, 2002 at 16:13:36, Gerd Isenberg wrote:

>Position from Shark - IsiChessMMX, Leiden Round 10
>
>[D] r4rk1/2n1b1pN/pqb1p1Qp/1p6/P1p3n1/N1P1B3/1PB2PPP/R2R2K1 b - - ; bm Rxf2
>
>Even if the position is already won by black, finding the spectacular 24...Rxf2
>seems quite difficult for some engines. Ruffian is clearly the fastest i tried
>so far on my 2.1XP+ :
>
>Ruffian 1.0.0    2 seconds
>Shredder5       14 seconds
>IsiChessMMX     47 seconds
>
>May be a bad testposition due to Nxe3 wins too.
>
>Cheers,
>Gerd

Hi all,

Thanks for all your replies.

IsiChess is even better now - 6 seconds at depth 7.

A matter of lazy eval threshold - and a design error.

I hold a recursive variable MaxPositionalScore, member of CNode, which got
initialized at the root and copied from parent to child nodes during the search.

If MaterialBalance + MaxPositionalScore is less alpha (together with some other
conditions and some depth dependencies), i use lazy eval.

If the absolute positional score, determined by some interior node eval, exceeds
this value, i used this maximum so far for shallower nodes.

But in positions like this, if both kings have some trouble, two relative huge
kingsafety penalties compensate each other and gave a relative small positional
sum. So unfortunately at the critical leaves no increase of MaxPositionalScore
occured in the path and lazy eval got triggered with a minimum threshold of only
2.5 Pawn units, which is obviously to less if you sacrificed a queen.

Maybe the whole idea of dynamic lazy eval threshold sucks due to alpha-beta
dependency, even if i look whether max(whitePos, blackPos) exceeds
MaxPositionalScore.

Actually i threw it out and use a rather huge constant instead.

Cheers,
Gerd




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