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Subject: Re: crafty fail low question: was Re: crafty fail high problem

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:52:24 06/05/01

Go up one level in this thread


On June 04, 2001 at 23:52:03, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:

>On June 04, 2001 at 23:13:33, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On June 04, 2001 at 17:00:10, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>>
>>>On June 01, 2001 at 13:59:11, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>>>I have been thinking about fail high's and fail low's. If you have a fail high,
>>>and you have used a significant portion of the time available for this move   (>
>>>25% ?), you should just make the move without further searching, as you will not
>>>have time to resolve the fail high and investigate other moves anyway.
>>>
>>>Fail low's are a different problem. When you get a fail low, what you know is
>>>that the current move has an upper bound at ply n of the ply n-1 value - window
>>>while all other moves have an upper bound at ply n-1 of the ply n-1 value. It
>>>seems it might be better to search some of the other moves before re-searching
>>>this one.
>>>
>>>This leads to a crafty question. In search.c, if all the values are < alpha (a
>>>fail low), the value returned is alpha and not MAX(values). Why is this ?
>>
>>
>>Why does it matter?  The value you get back is totally useless.  Because
>>everything cut off low on the alpha value.
>
>Is not the value you get back an upper bound for that subtree ? If you return
>and save that value in the hash table, if you later get a fail low closer to the
>root, you may not need to re-search this subtree.


I don't save root-move scores in the hash table.  I can't.  Because that
would mean before I search the first move at ply=1, I get a hash hit and
I don't want that.  I want a PV with at least the first move.  A hash entry
with an UPPER flag has no best move so that would be useless at the root.

That value will be saved from the ply=2 search of course...  and it will be
hit again of needed... but only after a ply-1 move has been searched.







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