Author: martin fierz
Date: 06:57:37 07/22/04
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On July 22, 2004 at 08:24:32, Anthony Cozzie wrote: >On July 21, 2004 at 10:20:30, Albert Silver wrote: > >>Hi, >> >>This is probably old news to many, but I ran across the pages of Michael Buro >>(http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/), and saw an article on ProbCut, highly >>recommending it, and even mentioning its inclusion in a version of Crafty 18.15. >> >>"ProbCut works in chess on top of null-move search! Download >>mpc_crafty_18.15.tgz to play with it. We encourage all chess programmers to >>experiment with ProbCut!" >> >>One can download the article "ProbCut: An Effective Selective Extension of the >>Alpha-Beta Algorithm" on his page of publications >>(http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mburo/publications.html) as well as a follow-up >>article "A.X. Jiang and M. Buro, First Experimental Results of ProbCut Applied >>to Chess", Proceedings of the Advances in Computer Games Conference 10, Graz >>2003. >> >>For new programmers looking for material, this is certainly one, plus it might >>be added to the links in the Computer Chess Resource Center. >> >> Albert > >To me, ProbCut just seems wrong. How can you throw out an 8 ply search based on >a 4 ply search and expect to get things to work, unless your margin is just >huge? (Null move is obviously completely different here). i suppose this depends on the game. e.g. checkers is much more benign in terms of evaluation - you can hardly misevaluate a position seriously if you simply count material. if you have won a man, you win the game (there are some exceptions of course...). => using probcut there makes a lot of sense. for chess, i don't see why it shouldn't work at all. of course nullmove is different, but both are methods to realize when you can stop wasting your time on useless positions. i'd say probcut is much closer to the human way of reasoning than nullmove. when i play a game of chess i stop searching at some point and evaluate the position, because i think it's safe to do so. i never think "now if the opponent could make two moves in a row....". probcut will work on the majority of positions where one side has bludered material. to get it working for the cases where one side sacced material for a deadly attack is going to be the problem! cheers martin
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