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Subject: Re: Bruce Moreland on rec.games.chess.computer

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 14:44:38 06/02/01

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On June 02, 2001 at 13:58:17, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>You wouldn't learn anything anyway.  There aren't any secrets in it, other
>than that I've been a little vague about describing how I implement singular
>extension, but it's unclear that singular extension makes the program any
>stronger.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>
>Ferret actually uses singular extensions!
>
>Yeeaargh! Bruce, I'm terribly curious now. Tells us all the details :)
>
>--
>GCP

I do a test to see if there is apparently only one move that doesn't suck.  I do
a reduced depth search.  If the first few don't drive the score to something
close to alpha, I leave, because I assume this is a fail-low node.  If one of
them drives the score pretty close to alpha, I check the rest to see if there
are any more that do this.

If there's only one move that looks decent, I call it singular and extend it a
ply.  This doesn't work in the endgame, but in the middlegame I found it
improved solution times in the ECM suite dramatically, while costing a ply in
the general case.

This extension made my search pretty unstable so I had to do some of the hash
table stuff mentioned in the DT article on singular extension published in the
ICCAJ some years ago.

When I ran two versions against each other, one with this extension stuff and
one without it, it seemed to score almost exactly 50%.  I left it in, for fun.

The version that played in the WCCC 1999 used this.  Don Beal came around
collecting program information and I told him then, so it may have already been
published in an ICCAJ.

bruce




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