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Subject: Re: Negascout

Author: Ernst A. Heinz

Date: 08:01:45 08/25/00

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Hi Christophe,

>Yes, but have you seen my own reply to your answer?
>
>It's not to be picky actually. I think there is a serious problem with the trick
>when you have a QSearch, and I wanted to have your opinion.

Yes, still as I said before -- personally, I do not think that
the quiescence search is the _real_ problem. A variable-depth
capture-only quiescence without any kind of alpha-beta related
stuff (e.g. futility pruning and lazy evaluation) would be a
perfectly fine black-box routine for scoring horizon nodes that
should work together with the negascout "trick" _without_ losing
theoretical correctness. The "trick" only fails with variable
depths in the _main_ search layer because that is where the
true fixed-depth 2-ply research always yields the same result as
the original zero-window search.

Have you read Dave Gomboc's answer where he tells about Jonathan
Schaeffer's experience with the negascout "trick". As soon as he
added extensions in the _main_ search, he ran into problems. If,
as I assume, he already had a quiescence search before, this
would provide empirical evidence and support for my argument.

Cheers,

=Ernst=




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