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Subject: Re: Foregoing positional eval in qsearch

Author: Edward Screven

Date: 16:12:54 11/20/97

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On November 20, 1997 at 18:49:17, John Scalo wrote:

>Q- Is it acceptable to run through the qsearch without ever evaluating
>the position? In other words only the material balance is considered. It
>sure is a lot faster and most positional eval's don't include a term
>worth more than half a pawn. But there are some obvious dangers such as
>ending up with a king in the middle of the board open to attack, etc. I
>suppose it's a tradeoff of speed/quality of play. Is the speed worth it?

i tried this once.  my program not only played worse, but it scored
lower on test suites.  but you should try it for yourself -- it should
be easy to implement.

i think a better direction is to work on forward pruning to reduce your
branching factor.  for example, do you use a static exchange evaluator
to nick losing captures?  how about razoring and futility cutoffs?
also, you might try lazy evaluation.

    - edward screven



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