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Subject: Re: Question about Alpha-Beta-Improvements

Author: Rafael Andrist

Date: 02:40:56 04/24/01

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On April 24, 2001 at 03:57:54, Tony Werten wrote:

>On April 23, 2001 at 11:12:55, Rafael Andrist wrote:
>
>>In my chessprog, I'm using an Alpha-Beta-Search with an infinite window. After
>>adding a hashtable, only half of the nodes need to be searched, but I get still
>>a branching factor around 9. The use of Iterative Deepening didn't change much.
>>So now my question is what can I do to improve the search? Should I try to
>>improve the move-sorting? Or is it necessary to use other pruning techniques
>>like Nullmove?
>
>The use of iterative deepening doesn't nescesairy help the BF. It's advantage is
>that you don't need to decide on forehand how deep you are going to search.
>
>If you decide to search 10 ply and you run out of time, without ID you have
>nothing, with ID you have the best move of ply 9.

I know, but I hoped that it helps sorting the moves too. It really does that
too, but only a little bit.

>
>BF of 9 is a bit too high but not too much if you don't use nullmove. There are
>a couple a reasons why it could be this high:
>
>Are you using killermoves ?(you should, noncaptures only)

Now I do :) and the BF has gone to 7.

>Is your evaluation a bit intelligent ? (it should, at least material and passed
>pawns)

Yes, my eval is little bit intelligent, I get good results in games with fixed
dephts.

>Do you store bestmoves in the hashtable (you should) ?

Yes.

>Do you store bestmove if score is <=alfa ? (you shouldn't)

No. Why is this bad?

>How do you orden capturemoves (to start with, use MVV/LVA, most valuable victim,
>least valuable attacker )
>Have you tried history tables ? (should help at lower depths )
>

my move ordering:

- Hashmove
- 2 Killers (just implemented)
- checking moves
- capturing moves (sorted like you discribed above)
- history heuristic
- castling (if there are moves with equal scores, castling should be favoured)
- moving piece (pawns first, king last)
- square onto which the piece move (center, near the opponent is good)

The history heuristic doesn't seem to work well, I may have to improve this too.

Thanks

Rafael B. Andrist

>Have fun trying out,
>
>Tony
>



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