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Subject: Re: Selectivity

Author: Bas Hamstra

Date: 07:40:23 01/13/01

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On January 13, 2001 at 02:14:55, David Rasmussen wrote:

>On January 12, 2001 at 22:08:50, Bas Hamstra wrote:
>
>>I don't know if it useful to compare nodes this way. My first PV at depth=10
>>comes in the order of nodes of GT, but then it switches 4 times, to end at a4 at
>>22M nodes. I might be that GT was lucky to not have those expensive PV switches.
>>
>>Bas.
>>
>>
>
>I know that it is a possibility, but it was the only example I had of a program
>that might have searched the position in considerably less nodes. Nevertheless,
>there ARE programs that are more selective than Chezzz and Crafty, and
>Christophe has countless times stated that he considers high selectivity far
>superior to more conservative brute-forcedness, when implemented correctly.
>
>So regardless of whether this position is representative ro not, I would still
>like to know a little bit about how the more selective programs achieve their
>selectiveness.

I suspect a combination of search based pruning like nullmove and evaluation
based pruning. If you can write a piece of eval to determine a position is
tactically safe for a couple of plies... Take nullmove. An amazing lot of nodes
are pruned based on the qsearch only. But a typical mini-qsearch like Crafty's
is far from reliable and has quite a bit of work to do too. You could write an
piece of eval, with all kind of threat detections that go far beyond what such a
qsearch can do in probably less ticks. For example (just a quick thought) what
about pruning a position where white has a good eval and the opponent can not
even attack one higher valued piece in one move? Where nullmove qsearch pruned
nodes sort of establish that a position is 1-ply tactically save this would
nearly mean that the opponent can hardly be dangerous within 2 of HIS plies.
That is the direction I would think.


Ciao!
Bas.







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