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Subject: Re: Question: How does your program allocate time?

Author: Peter McKenzie

Date: 22:20:17 09/03/00

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On September 03, 2000 at 22:36:41, William Bryant wrote:

>I/m working on my time allocation to improve my program's play.
>
>Given a time increment of Game/Unit_Time (or Game/Unit_Time + Increment per
>move),  how do you allocate the Unit_Time among individual searches?
>
>At present I'm doing the following.
>
>1. In the opening, (when out of book), I'm allocating 1/64th of the time left
>for a search (time_left>>6).

So you only want to do a short think in the opening?  I don't see the logic
behind that.

The only thing I do differently in the opening is use a bit extra for the 1st
move out of book (because hash tables will be empty then).  The amount of extra
time I use is randomised, which is nice because it makes it harder to repeat the
same game vs my program (useful on the chess servers).

>
>2. When past move 16, I change this to 1/32nd of the time left (time_left>>5).

This is similar to my normal strategy too, although I think I divide by either
30 or 25.

>
>3. If I fail low at the root, I will allocate up to an additional 5x the initial
>time to resolve the fail low.  It may take less, but this is the limit.

If I fail low at the root, I just multiply the original target time by 3.  I
will always use this extra time, even if the fail low is resolved earlier.  I
figure it can't hurt to use a little extra time because the position is probably
quite tricky.  Ok, so I couldn't be bothered putting the extra logic in :-)

>
>Any thoughts, comments, suggestions or discussion would be appreciated.

I use less time for obvious recaptures.  Such a recapture must pass some static
criteria, and it should also be the prefered move at the root at all depths
during the search.

>
>William
>wbryant@ix.netcom.com



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