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Subject: Re: Iterative deepening deep increment

Author: Ricardo Gibert

Date: 16:28:52 02/27/01

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On February 27, 2001 at 19:17:55, Christophe Theron wrote:

>On February 27, 2001 at 18:57:47, Ricardo Gibert wrote:
>
>>On February 27, 2001 at 18:36:03, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On February 27, 2001 at 17:08:16, Alvaro Jose Povoa Cardoso wrote:
>>>
>>>>By definition the iterative deepening procedure calls Search() several times,
>>>>and each time it increments _Depth_ by one.
>>>>But what if we increment by two?
>>>>Isn't a waste of time stepping just one ply deep at a time?
>>>>In my checkers program, I increment _Depth_ by two (2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16...) and
>>>>it seams to work better than stepping by one ply (2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,...).
>>>>Surely a previous search at _Depth-2_ gives a good PV to try first at this
>>>>iteration.
>>>>Comments anyone?
>>>>Does this aply to chess?
>>>>
>>>>Thank you
>>>>Alvaro Cardoso
>>>
>>>
>>>There are a couple of issues:
>>>
>>>1.  each iteration takes about 3x as long as the previous if you increment
>>>depth by 1.  If you increment depth by 2, then each iteration will take about
>>>9x as long.  If iteration N takes 1 minute, you have a target of 3 minutes,
>>>you will choose to not try N+2 as there is no hope of finishing it.  It actually
>>>makes more sense to go in .5 ply increments near the end of the search since
>>>that gives you a better chance of finishing an 12.5 ply search when a 12 ply
>>>search would be too quick and a 13 ply search would take too long.
>>
>>That makes sense.
>>
>>How about a slight modification: Let's say you decide not to try N + 2, due to
>>lack of time. You could still decide to do N + 1 and thus only have the odd-even
>>problem on the last ply. When you don't have time to do N + 1, then you've
>>avoided the odd-even problem completely.
>
>
>I have noticed that ChessGenius for Palm does that.
>
>I tried with my program Chess Tiger, and the results were bad. I think I have
>spent one week on this, and I was disappointed by the results.

What explanation did you come up with to account for the disappointing results?

>
>I notice that Genius for PC does not do that anymore. ChessGenius for Palm is
>the 1987 version of Lang's program, Genius for PC is the 1995 version, so it
>looks like Lang himself has found it was not such a good idea.
>
>
>    Christophe
>
>
>
>
>>>2.  BeBe did odd ply searches.  The reason was to eliminate the odd-even
>>>problem where odd ply searches are aggressive, even ply searches are more
>>>passive.  But he had the problem described in 1 above.



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