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Subject: Re: The depth of the chess tree, the size of the game of chess...

Author: J. Wesley Cleveland

Date: 18:16:58 05/10/01

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On May 10, 2001 at 18:19:43, Dann Corbit wrote:

>On May 10, 2001 at 18:14:02, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>
>>On May 10, 2001 at 16:48:39, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>
>>>NO big-O stuff in here!  I promise!
>>[snip]
>>>
>>>Now the board positions is another matter.  Let's suppose that there are only
>>>10^50th distinct board positions, including halfmove clock, castle rights, etc.
>>>We might store those in a linear list, and just have pointers from our tree to
>>>the list.  We would have to use 64 bit pointers because of the size of the list
>>>(some other clever indexing method might conceivably reduce this).
>>>
>>>Even if we could use perfect move ordering and only store sqrt(5.28713e9320)
>>>elements in the list, that's still a lot of pointers.
>>>
>>>Or have I missed something.
>>
>>Yes. Each position has the best move (or 1 of the n equal best moves) stored
>>with it.
>
>You STILL have to store the whole tree!  You won't be able to compute the best
>move until you have analyzed the whole tree.
>
>IOW -- where does the best move COME from?
>
>The entire problem we are facing here is:
>What is the best move from this position:
>[D]rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w KQkq -
>The entire effort I am talking about is to find the answer to what is the best
>move from here!
>
>How will you answer that question until you know all the others.
>
>Storing the best move doesn't help a thing.

You do your standard alpha-beta search (which only needs O(maximum
depth*branching factor) bytes memory (which is trivial in comparison). When you
have a node with a result, you save it. When all nodes below a given node have a
result, you can mark that node with a result and a best move. Continue, and
eventually you will have a result for the starting position.



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