Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Alpha/Beta move list (was: Re: rebel10 bug?)

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 17:37:37 10/20/98

Go up one level in this thread


On October 20, 1998 at 09:29:45, Jari Huikari wrote:

>On October 20, 1998 at 09:03:46, Jari Huikari wrote:
>
>>What about only having higher value for beta cutoffs in Ply=2. Won't it find
>>then exact values of the best replies for opponent and so with quite a low
>>cost values for legal moves? Two plies minimax, the rest alpha-beta. Can it
>>cost many plies?
>
>	Forget it... I have drunk too few coffee this morning!
>
>Oh course it will take 19 times longer. But would this give any better
>move ordering if used only in searchdepth=2 in iterative deepening? The
>move order could be slightly better for deeper lookaheads?
>
>					Jari

You ask two questions without realizing it, so I will rephrase and answer
each implied question separately:

(1) will a 2-ply (or whatever shallow depth) search done like this (minimax
at the root to produce a true score for each move) produce decent move ordering?

The answer is yes.  I did this in Cray Blitz as a root-move ordering strategy
as well as a debugging strategy (ie why is Rb8 better than Rc8?  with true
scores for every move you can answer that, even though it takes a bunch of
time).

(2) will such a search be better than what we do today?  Not really, based on
some comparisons I did when starting development on Crafty.  In some cases it
would be better, in others, worse.  I chose to not do it due to the extra
complexity of managing this...

But I'd suggest anyone working on a chess program try it, if for nothing else
than the nice debugging facility it gives...




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.