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Subject: Junior: "Fast" Searcher or "Deep" Searcher?

Author: Fernando Villegas

Date: 16:33:25 04/19/98


Hi Amir:
I have just played my first game against Junior -the module in Fritz- at
a relatively serious rhythm, 40 in 60, game that I lost after 50 moves
of a very hard fight for him but specially for me, of course, otherwise
I would be the winner.
My first impression is that the expression “fast searcher” with which is
defined even by you in the cd-rom clip is somewhat misleading as much as
there is some ambiguity in the definition of what it is “fast” search in
the first place.
What I saw is that Junior reaches very very soon 12 ply, faster than
Fritz even if Fritz counts more nodes per second than Junior. Then, I
thought that the speed of search should not be automatically considered
like something equal to the count number, but to the ply number. In my
opinion Junior is fast because he goes very soon to very deep searches,
not because the great crunching of nodes he does to get that. I can
easily imagine an even faster computer in terms of nodes, but very slow
in terms of ply if the search is totally full-width, without any pruning
at all. In that case the very fact of exponential growing of the tree
would impede a deep search at all. On the contrary. I can imagine an
slow thinking machine -like the human brain- reaching very deep levels
of ply because of an exceedingly good pruning or selective search.
So, when we say that this or that program is “fast searcher” we are not
concluding the search of how that program is, as it seem to happens, but
just beginning with it. We don’t advance even an step saying that a
program is “fast” searcher in comparison with another that supposedly is
“knowledge searcher”. If, as I think,  fast search equals deep search,
then there is a pruning device, a selective criteria. And if there is
such thing, the key to understand the problem is not just to say how
“fast” the program is, but to insvestigate how the program do so deep
search.
So, dear Amir, why don’t you tell us a little bit the way you get those
very deep searches?
Fernando



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