Author: Tony Werten
Date: 13:24:38 02/24/01
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On February 23, 2001 at 16:16:23, Severi Salminen wrote: >On February 23, 2001 at 13:13:42, James Swafford wrote: > >>On February 23, 2001 at 11:19:20, Rafael Andrist wrote: >> >>>How is nodes per second defined (or what is usually meant)? Are all nodes >>>included, or is it without quiescent nodes? Is the hash table disabled to >>>measure this value? >>> >>>Rafael B. Andrist >> >>Most folks try to count interior, frontier, and quiescent nodes. >>You can measure this by entrances to the search / qsearch functions, >>or by make, etc. >> >>I don't think there's a concrete definition, which makes comparison >>between programs meaningless. > >Well I think that the most of chess programs count all visited nodes - there is >not too much to interpret on that one. So whenever we enter a "new" node we >increment a counter. Yes, but do you count make_move or do you count every time you enter search. It makes a difference if you generate illegal moves, make them and discover you're in check. You did do a make_move but not a new entrance in search ( or maybe you do and jump out if you can take the king ) Lots of interpretations. But still it's impossible to compare programs. I do things in my evaluation that can save me a few ply of search. So I have low nps but good effective depth. A good example of this is checking if your passed pawn is out of reach of the opponents king ( and he has no other pieces ) It takes time but can save you 10 ply of search easily. > >The biggest difference is probably whether to count the root node or not... Of >course there might be programs calculating the first qnodes twice (incrementing >at the beginnig of search() and then again in qsearch()), but there is no way to >find that out, except when NPS rate is very high ;) I knew a guy who was a bit ashamed of his low nps that he actually did inc(node_counter,7) But then again, he had very original other ideas as well. One of the best was the amateur-professional heuristic. He noticed that his program would play nice against professionals but then somewhere thought he could win a piece only to find out a few ply later that he had just wrecked his position. So his heuristic was: If you play a better engine and think you can win a piece, prune this line because it isn't good. Worked very well, extending his losses with at least 20 moves. He threw it out when once he played a good engine and could have won a piece. Tony > >Severi
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