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Subject: Re: Experimentation with move ordering

Author: Dan Newman

Date: 10:17:33 11/30/00

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On November 28, 2000 at 13:34:30, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On November 28, 2000 at 12:52:57, Scott Gasch wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I posted a couple of messages about move ordering yesterday and wanted to share
>>some results from my (limited) testing.  I ended up implementing the suggested
>>"apparently losing captures" (MVV/LVA) after all others order.  In one test
>>position this resulted in a tree 200k nodes larger at 8 ply but in two others it
>>resulted in a marginally smaller (under 40k nodes) tree at 8 ply.  I will do
>>more testing on this matter but it may be a moot point because I intend to write
>>a SEE pretty soon.
>>
>>I also did some experimenting with ordering captures that take the last moved
>>enemy piece.  At low search depth this seems to make some difference but at
>>higher depth this heuristic actually grew the tree in all three test positions I
>>tried.
>>
>>I also did some playing with history weight and settled on hist[x][y] += (2 <<
>>depth).  My numbers (this is total nodes searched until ply x including plys
>>1..x-1) for d2d4 d7d5 e2e4 e7e5 are currently:
>
>Just a note.  2<<depth is not a good idea.  what happens if you search to 32
>plies?  This is more than possible with today's hardware.  Unless you are using
>a 64 bit integer.


I ran into trouble with this some time ago.  The move ordering goes bad when
the history table entries overflow.  I switched to depth * depth after seeing
it in Crafty--I'd tried a bunch of other things that didn't work too well.
I now use (depth * depth) >> 10 since I use fractional plies.  IIRC, I found
some overflows with plain depth squared...

-Dan.


>
>
>
>>
>>1. 45
>>2. 621
>>3. 3725
>>4. 14146
>>5. 38694
>>6. 183449
>>7. 598020
>>8. 1286875
>>
>>I am doing null move (R=2/3 depending on remaining and normal futility pruning
>>with a slightly larger than safe window on frontier nodes and in qnodes.  I've
>>read about extended futility pruning and razoring too.  I'd be interested in
>>other ideas to cut down the tree search size... be they other move ordering
>>heuristics or other pruning methods that are reasonably safe.  How do the nodes
>>searched in the position given compare to other engines?
>>
>>Thanks again,
>>Scott



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