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

Author: J. Wesley Cleveland

Date: 11:16:24 06/05/01

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On June 05, 2001 at 11:52:24, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>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.

That is not what I meant. Let me give an example. Say you are searching the
first move with a window of (.4, -.4). One move at ply 3 drops a queen and has
an upper bound of -8.2. Your search fails low, you re-search and establish a
lower bound of -.55. You re-examine the move that loses a queen. The value in
the hash table is the old alpha (-.4). If you had saved the true upper bound,
you would not need to re-search.



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