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Subject: Re: Positional scores in Eval()

Author: Jon Dart

Date: 20:40:21 04/09/01

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>On April 09, 2001 at 17:04:09, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

> An interesting thing is lazy evaluation, as the problems of it are
> very similar to futility pruning.

As another poster has said, it is not really risky to exit the eval early if
you're certain you are going to be have a score outside the search bounds. I
have a test mode where it goes through the full eval always but also checks to
see if it would have done a lazy exit, and if so, if it would have done so in
error. I run it once in a while and expect no errors.

> A possible compromise i found in tests was to increase the margin.

Yes. Crafty apparently uses a 1 pawn margin for futility pruning in the qsearch.
I tried this and didn't like the results. Mine is almost 2 pawns.

I also account for trade bonuses and other adjustments to the material score
that would be made as a result of the capture. So I'm pretty conservative, at
least in the qsearch (I do other somewhat riskier pruning in the main search).
I've been trying some alternative strategies lately but haven't found reason to
make major changes so far.

> My big question was: what score to return for example if evaluation in this
> position is e and e+ 3.5 pawns <= alfa ?

> Must one return alpha, estimated evaluation or evaluation+3.5 pawns,
> when talking about e+margin <= alfa (idem story for e-margin >= beta) ?

I return the estimated evaluation. But I fail to see that it makes a lot of
difference. If it's below alpha, you're not going to propagate this evaluation
up the tree, anyway.

--Jon



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