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Subject: Re: Experimentation with move ordering

Author: Dan Newman

Date: 11:28:28 11/30/00

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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 tried this with MVV/LVA a while back and had much the same result.  I think
the trouble is that it sorts perfectly good captures that would cause a
cutoff to the end of the list.  NxP might lose the knight, but quite often
(in the search) it will simply win the pawn (and give a cutoff).  There are
lots of nonsense positions in the search where pieces are simply put enprise.

When you switch to a SEE this changes since the SEE gives a much more
accurate assesment of these "losing" captures--at least it's more often
right than MVV/LVA for this.


>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:
>
>1. 45
>2. 621
>3. 3725
>4. 14146
>5. 38694
>6. 183449
>7. 598020
>8. 1286875
>


Here's what Shrike gets:

 2       670
 3      2363
 4      7354
 5     27901
 6    103043
 7    307139
 8   1042687
 9   3232257
10   7967050

-Dan.


>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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