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Subject: Re: Fail highs..which subsequently fail low

Author: William Bryant

Date: 15:26:42 08/27/00

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On August 27, 2000 at 17:33:15, Tom King wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>a question for programmers on fail highs.
>
>what do you do in your program if a fail high is encountered, which on the
>research fails low?
>
>I've ignored this issue, because it doesn't seem to happen all that often (in my
>program). So if my program finds a move which fails high, even if the research
>indicates that it maybe shouldn't have failed high, it thinks the move is good.
>Maybe this is bad? At the WMCCC recently, I noticed a couple of these fail high/
>fail low moves cropping up at critical, complex positions. Often I was unhappy
>with the move my program chose in these cases. Perhaps these fail high/ fail low
>moves need to be treated with suspicion?
>
>Cheers,
>Tom

Tom,

I've had the same problem and asked the same question.  Here is a nice detailed
explination that I saved, posted here about a year ago.  The original poster
was Bob (Dr. Hyatt).

" A root move fails high, but then fails low on the re-search.  I keep the
fail-high move.  You can probably eliminate the fail-low by simply searching
with -inf,+inf, but it will be slower, and due to hash overwrites/draft problems
this fail-high/fail-low problem will happen without this large window.  And with
the large window you might fail high  on bound X, but get a score back that is
< X ...

It is mainly an artifact of null-move search and hashing..."

Hope this helps.  I keep the move, and go onward to the next iteration...

William
wbryant@ix.netcom.com




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