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Subject: Re: Is my move ordering acceptable?

Author: Tord Romstad

Date: 09:55:58 10/30/03

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On October 30, 2003 at 12:31:20, Daniel Clausen wrote:

>On October 30, 2003 at 12:27:16, Tord Romstad wrote:
>
>[snip]
>
>>Perhaps, but how do you measure the branching factor?  I have asked this
>>question here before, but never recieved any answer.
>
>I think most people calculate it by dividing the time used for ply=N with the
>time used for ply=N-1.

Of course, but for what kind of positions?  People often make statements
like "my branching factor is less than 3", but I have no idea what they
mean.  As we all know, the numbers vary widely depending on the position.
Do you consider only positions where the best move doesn't change as
the depth increases, or also positions where the PV changes frequently?
Only middlegame positions, or also endgame positions where the number
of legal moves is much smaller?  Do you exclude the first few plies
(where the branching factor tends to be much higher, as is mentioned
elsewhere in the thread) of the search from the calculations?

I suppose it is necessary to compute averages from a big number of
games in order to get any meaningful numbers, but there still remains
some important questions.  In order to get a meaningful measure one
should somehow assign more weight to the last few iterations of the
search than to the first few ones, but it is not at all clear to me
how this should be done.

Tord



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