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Subject: Re: Question on move ordering.

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 13:00:22 09/25/98

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On September 24, 1998 at 21:51:55, John Coffey wrote:

>When we talk about move ordering, are we talking about sorting all the moves
>or just trying to pick the best one?  I think that we may covered this before,
>where Robert said ....
>
>"generally accepted terminology says that if, when you get a fail-high,
>it happens on the first move at least 90% of the time, you have what is
>called a "strongly-ordered game tree with near-perfect ordering."   Crafty
>is sitting at around 92-94% on this statistic..."
>
>John Coffey


the only thing that matters is picking the best move first, when you can
get a cutoff.  At every other ply in a normal search (not on the PV move
however, which is more complex, but on every other root-move) you will find
that at ply=2 you expect to get a cutoff on move 1, while at ply=3 you don't
and have to search all the moves, but at ply=4 you get a cutoff on move one,
and this repeats, assuming your move ordering is perfect.

So getting that best move first is important on nodes where you expect a
cutoff.  However, if the best doesn't cause a cutoff, they you try another
good one assuming your "best" really wasn't best.  After a few of these,
you might become convinced that this is a non-cutoff node and give up on
the ordering.  I try the hash move, winning/even captures, 2 killers, and
then 4 history moves.  If I haven't gotten a cutoff by here I quit fooling
around and search the rest in generated order...



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