Author: Tom Kerrigan
Date: 20:37:12 08/11/00
Go up one level in this thread
On August 11, 2000 at 22:45:05, Robert Hyatt wrote: >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. I never said that check extensions completely eliminate horizon-effect problems. But if you don't extend when in check, your program will just throw away its pieces to give check and only later realize that those pieces are useful... -Tom
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