Author: Ralf Elvsén
Date: 08:36:30 06/05/00
Some time ago I wrote an "experimental" program in Java, just to learn the basics. I have now started to port it to C but I am glad I wrote the first version in Java since I find it much easier to quickly do what I want, exception handling and threading is very easy etc. One thing I have in the Java version is a kind of debug mode. For instance, if I look at the PV and think "why did it choose move X instead of move Y at ply 6?" , I can enter this debug mode. Then for each ply I will be asked which branch I want to examine. I step through the moves ply by ply and thus chose which nodes I want to observe. There I can see how all the moves are scored, how alpha and beta changes etc. I can also chose to follow the search after nullmoves. Running a search in this mode is exactly as a normal search, except that I get very precise information about what happens. I find this just as superior compared to a looking at a PV, as the PV is superior to just looking at the best move at the root. I found many search- and evaluation bugs in this way. The downside is that the code tends to become kind of messy (and a new class of bugs is introduced) and I am not looking forward to do it in C. Before I once again start to implement this I would like to hear if this is a common way to debug, or if you have an even better method I sure would like to hear about it. Ralf
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