Author: Georg v. Zimmermann
Date: 07:21:19 07/19/00
Hi, I have huge problems with the horizon effect in my program (i.e. it sacks pawns to push a queen loss far away). It is my understanding that these problems have been solved in modern chess programs mainly because they reach high enough ply depths. Now imagine you were back in those times of much slower hardware : what can you do to battle this problem ? === What I tried so far is I. big extensions on checks and captures This even worsened the problem, and I don't understand why. II. detection of useless sacks If a sack just lost material but didn't improve the positional eval old killer moves (ply 2, opps turn) get extended to see whether the original threat was really eliminated. This didn't work probably cause it is so complicated I had too many bugs in it. === Some background: I am playing around with a program that plays crazyhouse and bughouse, chess variants where you can drop the pieces you captured from your opponent or your partner captured from his opponent instead of a move. This increases the number of possible moves by a lot (average maybe 33 in normal chess to over 110 in crazyhouse/bughouse). This means you need an about 50 times faster computer to reach 7 ply than in normal chess. Together with the nature of this game (games are decided by king attacks) it makes for an exiting challence. When was the last time you beat your program at 1 0 lightning/bullet time control ? :-) http://bughouse.net/info/index.htm#howtoplay ( Rules ) http://home.att.net/~cferrante/chess/index.html ( Bughouse Problems )
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