Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 09:01:36 08/22/04
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On August 22, 2004 at 11:24:07, Dan Honeycutt wrote: >On August 21, 2004 at 17:52:58, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >[snip] >> >>No x-rays is a serious shortcoming. IE two rooks attacking the same square in >>battery. If you don't include the second rook I could see how SEE could cause >>problems. I handle X-rays pretty easily and always did even back in CB days... > >Could you not say the same thing for pins? It is a less serious problem, IMHO. x-rays are very common. Two rooks or rook and queen lined up. Ditto for bishops/queens. Or bishops/pawns/queens, and so forth. > >I started with a really cheap SEE which was just MVV/LVA with a call to >InCheck() to see if the captured piece was defended. Using that to cull >captures in QSearch was a definite help (once I got rid of a bug where I threw >away the good captures and kept the bad ones) > >Buoyed by that I wrote a better SEE that took into account all attackers and >defenders. No discernable increase in strength. > >So I wrote a still better SEE looking for x-rays aka what you do in Crafty. No >discernable increase in strength. > >Now I'm working on adding pins. I keep hoping but I'm afraid it will be another >no discernable increase in strength. It depends on what you use the result for. If you use it to toss out lemon captures in the q-search, more accurate is better, but remember that the q-search is far-removed from the root position. In a normal game, crafty hits 14=15 plies in the middlegame. q-search errors don't seem to be a problem with a search that deep covering for the mistakes. At blitz it might be worse although in 5 min games on ICC crafty hits 12 plies in the middlegame a lot, which still covers for the errors. Stuart is reporting the opposite... that SEE is killing his tactical scores. That is what I can't understand, because the pruned q-search tree should make him faster and tactically stronger, not the opposite, unless there is a serious flaw somewhere... > >Really rather frustrating. I keep making what I think should be improvements >and get no results. > >Dan H. I found the same with SEE and pins. I did one of these years ago (the comments in main.c should say where) as Joel Rivat and I were comparing notes early in my/his bitboard programming. Joel wanted as much accuracy as possible, and convinced me it was important. Adding pins was not that difficult, but it slowed the SEE code down and seemed to offer no advantage except in contrived test positions we created. I threw it out and kept my current SEE implementation...
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