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Subject: Re: Beating MTD(n,f)

Author: Andrew Williams

Date: 07:12:36 06/06/01

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On June 06, 2001 at 09:06:40, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On June 06, 2001 at 06:25:40, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>
>>On June 06, 2001 at 05:05:28, Dan Andersson wrote:
>>
>>>>Behaviour of MTD is a horror in normal positions when
>>>>score slowly drops. Also with pawn being 1000 units MTD is hard to use,
>>>>as well as most commercials which give big scores for some patterns there
>>>>MTD is not usable.
>>>>
>>>
>>>This is simply not true.
>>
>>Actually I think Vincent is right here, although I would
>>really like an objective measure, because this is just
>>guesswork based on how we understand the search.
>>
>>The catch is that most strong MTD'f implmementations use convergence
>>accelerators, and those will make the difference between centipawn
>>and millipawn scoring void.
>
>Noop it doesn't make it void.
>
>To get from 100 to 200 is harder as it is to get from 10 to 20.
>
>That's the diff between 0.100 and 0.200 in millipawns and
>0.10 and 0.20 in centipawns.
>
>If i use alfa=beta-1
>and in the root try to get to a truebound, then the number of
>extra nodes is huge. I did this at a time when pawn=200 for diep.
>
>In diep last 2 years pawn=1000 everywhere now.
>
>I get big differences in node counts using MTD,

Why not show us a couple of examples, Vincent? If you
have test data about this, why not share it?


>let's formulate it this way. If MTD would work great,
>why am i not using it?
>
>Why is no other commercial program using it?
>
>The only program using it is SOS, Postmodernist, cilkchess.
>
>Those programs all share that they have
>  a) very little chessknowledge
>  b) pawn is worth not 1000 but more like 100 at most
>  c) the knowledge the programs have is not scored
>     as high as in other programs.

b) Is correct for PM. As for a) and c), you've never seen PM's
source code, so how can you possibly know? The fact that MTD(f)
doesn't work well in your program doesn't mean it wouldn't work
well in someone else's program does it?

Andrew

>
>Best regards,
>Vincent
>




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