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Subject: Re: History Heuristic

Author: Larry Griffiths

Date: 19:36:26 08/28/00

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On August 28, 2000 at 22:21:40, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On August 28, 2000 at 19:32:05, Larry Griffiths wrote:
>
>>I have been reading about the History Heuristic and have seen pro's and con's
>>about it.
>>
>>I plan on implementing it to see what happens.  This heuristic is related to
>>killer moves and uses the from and to squares in a 64 x 64 array to maintain
>>history information when moves are bestmoves or cutoffs.  Each entry has 2 to
>>the depth power added to it when a bestmove or cutoff is found.
>>
>>Would you recommend the History Heuristic, and has anything changed for the
>>better with the method described above?
>>
>>Thanks in advance.
>>
>>Larry.
>
>
>Works fine, but don't use 2^depth...  for reasonable search depths, that will
>overflow 32 bit counters almost immediately.  I use depth^2 which is much
>safer...
>
>Other than that it works fine.  If you don't get a cutoff by the time you have
>tried a few history-ordered moves, you probably should give up and just search
>the rest of the moves in random order.

I have Jonathan Schaeffer's paper "The History Heuristic and Alpha-Beta Search
Enhancements in Practice".  I also figured the counters might overflow and it
looks like he ran his tests to around 9 plys.  He also describes that the
history tables can become flooded with information, decreasing their usefulness.
 I wondered if this was due to an overflow of his counters at plys 8 and 9.

Excuse me Bob, but I have not done powers in quite a while and I was thinking
2^depth amounted to shifting the binary value 2 left depth positions.  Maybe I
am just tired, but is depth^2 like depth squared?  I plan on using 64 bit
counters so I am not worried about overflowing the counters.  I thought I would
also try different formula's for calculating the weights.

Larry.



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