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Subject: Re: Is the crafty approach to pondering the right one?+suggestion

Author: J. Wesley Cleveland

Date: 10:32:52 05/26/00

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On May 25, 2000 at 12:31:44, Bruce Moreland wrote:

>On May 24, 2000 at 19:23:16, Roberto Waldteufel wrote:
>
>>My program does precisely what you describe - it ponders by simply searching as
>>if it were to play for the oponent. Have you noticed a significant improvement
>>by focusing only on the predicted move? My reasoning in adopting this approach
>>was that the predicted move would be the root PV move in our method, which takes
>>the lion's share of the search time anyway, so the time investment in the other
>>moves is only a modest, and some advantage is achieved whatever the oponent
>>plays. Maybe I should switch to Crafty's method?
>
>The PV takes most of the time, but you still have to get a ply less.  If you
>search for 3 minutes, on position P, you'll get to D plies.  If you choose a
>successor of position P and search for three minutes, you'll get to
>approximately D plies again.
>
>So what we've really got to choose between here is:
>
>1) Picking the best move and searching to D plies.
>
>  - or -
>
>2) Searching all of them to D-1, then relying on the hash table to have anough
>information that we'll get through D plies somewhat faster than we would have
>when it comes time to search it.  This is a clearly inferior solution if the
>predicted move is made, but you have to balance this against the idea that you
>might have some efficiency gain if the opponent makes a move that wouldn't have
>been predicted.
>

how about

3) Searching the best move until you would reply instantaneously if your
opponent made that move, and then switch to searching the next best move.

>I haven't done any experiments but I think the first way must be better.  You
>predict a lot of the time, and therefore you receive the full benefit.  You
>throw your opponent off with an instantaneous reply in some cases.
>
>Weighed against this some increased efficiency getting to depth D-1.  Maybe it's
>better but I doubt it.
>
>bruce



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