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Subject: Re: Random factor in static evaluation!

Author: Bruce Moreland

Date: 16:00:02 06/15/01

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It's a little bit hard to tell from the post, but he's talking about a random
*constant* value, that is set at program boot.  There's nothing wrong with that
idea, other than that you'd have to dump the constants to a log file if you want
to be able to reproduce bugs.

bruce

On June 15, 2001 at 17:16:30, Eugene Nalimov wrote:

>Without *lot of care* you will see search instabilities. Imagine, for example,
>that you are using aspiration search, and searching the move with bounds (alpha,
>beta). Search returned some value that is greater than beta. You start research
>with bounds (beta, +infinity). But due to the randomness the critical position
>now has score less than beta, so you'll end up having fail-high followed by
>fail-low -- not very pleasant situation.
>
>You can fix this particular problem by always modifying your score by the same
>value -- e.g. you can fill the 1024-entry table by the random values at the
>program startup, and at the end of your evaluator write
>    score += rand_table[score&1023];
>This way you'll have some randomness, and there is some hope that program will
>play different moves in the same position. But you still have to be careful if
>you use book learning, persistent hash table, etc.
>
>Eugene
>
>On June 15, 2001 at 16:41:06, Tiago Ribeiro wrote:
>
>>Why not introduce some random factor in static evaluation?
>>
>>Example:
>>
>>srand( time ( 0 ) );
>>
>>char ten = 7 + rand() % 5;
>>char fif = 12 + rand() % 6;
>>...
>>
>>#define DB_P_PENALTY	ten
>>#define BAD_BISHOP 	fif
>>
>>etc.,etc
>>
>>The same can be made for the value of the pieces!
>>
>>Just giving a small random margin, the game doesn't lose a significant quality
>>and  becomes unexpected, what can be a technique anti-great master! :)
>>
>>I will try this in 'Replicant'!
>>
>>
>>Tiago Ribeiro



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