Author: Tom King
Date: 13:48:41 05/07/01
Hi all, there's been a few postings recently about strategies for programs to effectively order moves at the root of the search. One strategy which is quite interesting is the "order by nodes searched" heuristic, used by Crafty (and maybe others). Currently, my program, Francesca, uses a very simple "order by eval()" heuristic for ordering root moves. As a test, I played a series of games between the standard version of my program, and a version which uses a "order by nodes searched" heuristic for ordering root moves. I set these two versions playing blitz, last night. When I just checked, they had played 130 games, and each had scored 50%. Each had won 37, lost 37, and drawn 56. Amazing that it should end so even! It's difficult to draw any conclusions from this. Probably more games are needed to see if "order by nodes searched" really helps. My hunch is that it may be a win at slower time controls - move ordering becomes more important the deeper you search.. [this reminds me of the time back in 1995 when the move ordering in my program was very poor.. didn't seem to matter too much at blitz, but at slower time controls, the search just ground to a halt. I remember (fondly) how I made some improvements to Francesca's move ordering, and suddenly she was searching throught the deeper plies 10 times quicker! Ah! great days..] Rgds, Tom
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