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Subject: Re: Fail-Low ?

Author: Will Singleton

Date: 23:21:58 04/05/00

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On April 06, 2000 at 00:45:28, Nobuhiro Yoshimura wrote:

>On April 05, 2000 at 20:57:30, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On April 05, 2000 at 20:54:52, Nobuhiro Yoshimura wrote:
>>
>>>   I am writing a Japanese Chess program using PVS with iterative deeping and
>>>hash tables.   I often get a fail-low at the root node at the end stage of
>>>the game.   I would like to know how offten do you get fail-lows in
>>>searching the chess game tree and also what kind of bugs are possible to
>>>cause many fai-lows.
>>
>>
>>I don't quite understand why you think it is a bug.  IE sometimes when you
>>go a ply deeper, you discover some threat your opponent has that you simply
>>can't defend against, and the score drops.  It is not abnormal...
>
>I just thought that since PVS is a good searching algorithm and is
>being used by many chess programmers that it would not produce
>many fail-lows that are very bad for search efficincy.

I'm not sure if you understand this or not, but a fail-low or -high is simply a
returned score that's outside your current search window.  The benefit from
using a narrow search window outwieghs the cost of researching after the
failure.

Having said that, let me say that I use PVS, but I don't use a narrow window at
the root.  I always use +- inf, so no fails or researching is necessary.  My
testing shows that PVS doesn't benefit that much, if at all, from the narrow
window.

Will




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