Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 19:45:05 08/11/00
Go up one level in this thread
On August 11, 2000 at 17:56:02, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >On August 11, 2000 at 15:49:57, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On August 11, 2000 at 13:48:22, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >> >>>On August 11, 2000 at 09:09:38, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>> >>>>On August 10, 2000 at 23:20:42, Tom Kerrigan wrote: >>>> >>>>>On August 10, 2000 at 21:46:24, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>>>> >>>>>>Either way will work. your way is the way suggested by software engineering. >>>>>>And your way will have less debugging. Your way will make it hard to evaluate >>>>> >>>>>If your program has no check extension and no quiescence search, how is it any >>>>>easier to debug? >>>>> >>>>>-Tom >>>> >>>> >>>>It has less code to go wrong. I started off writing my move generator and >>>>nothing else. I debugged that until I was sure it worked. That is far >>>>easier than writing the whole thing, then debugging several thousand lines >>>>of new and untested code, all at one time. >>>> >>>>This is why the top-down approach became so popular years ago... >>> >>>Yes, I also wrote my move generator before anything else. >>> >>>But Lenoid has written an entire chess program. He simply refuses to put in >>>extensions or qsearch. >>> >>>I think such a program would be harder to debug. Does it play God-awful moves >>>because it has no qsearch, or is it due to some bug? Hard to tell. >>> >>>-Tom >> >> >>I wouldn't argue with that statement at all. Not having any q-search will lead >>to many bogus PVs, obviously. But once you have a reasonable search, a reason- >>able q-search, and a simple eval(), you are set to test and debug for a long > >Right, Lenoid doesn't have a reasonable q-search. > >I believe that check extensions are also necessary to avoid horrible >horizon-effect moves. > >-Tom I don't think it is too hard to understand the horizon effect, and notice when you see it in your PVs. IE even search extensions don't eliminate this problem so it is useful to become skilled at recognizing the problem anyway, because it will happen no matter what you do (maybe less frequently, but less != 0). I am more concerned about the kind of bugs that cause more subtle and hard to reproduce errors. Horizon effects are easy to see (with experience). A legal move generator that misses the one enpassant way out of check is much more difficult to catch.
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