Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 22:47:40 02/12/04
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On February 12, 2004 at 22:17:46, Anthony Cozzie wrote: >Nullmove may be the best thing to happen to computer chess ever, but its not >perfect. I'm beginning to get a nagging feeling that recursive null move pruning (at least the conventional kind) is possibly the *worst* thing to happen to computer chess ever. There has to be a better way to reduce the size of the tree, but I have no clue how to find it. :-( The zugzwang problem is not too serious, of course, and if you really care about it it is not hard to solve. The real problem with recursive null move pruning is that it performs horribly at finding long non-forcing lines. For instance, a human player could take a quick look at a position and see that black needs to exchange off white's strong knight on c4, and notice that this could be achieved by the maneuvre f7-f6 followed by Bh7-g6-e8-d7-c8-a6xc4. A recursive null move searcher needs a huge search depth to find such plans. Tactically, recursive null move pruning performs really well. Strategically, it's horrendous. Tord
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