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Subject: Re: Question to Dr. Hyatt and Bruce Moreland

Author: Steffen Jakob

Date: 08:51:38 07/08/01

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On July 08, 2001 at 10:02:27, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 08, 2001 at 08:56:32, Alvaro Jose Povoa Cardoso wrote:
>
>>
>>My problems with mate scores adjustments are all gone now, thanks to the help of
>>Dr. Hyatt and Bruce Moreland.
>>
>>In main.c of Crafty 16.18 there is the following notes:
>>* A very interesting bug was found in storing mate bounds in the hash *
>>* table, one I had not heard of before.  I now store two MATE         *
>>* bounds, either > MATE-300, or < -MATE+300, which is conservative    *
>>* but safe.
>>
>>Could you please explain why should we do so?
>
>
>
>This had to do with the problem that the bound is an absolute thing that
>says the score can not be less than X or it can not be  greater than X.
>But X depends on the ply depth and it caused problems when I tried to adjust
>it like I adjust exact mate scores.  That is all that I can really say here as
>this was done several years ago and I don't recall the exact circumstance where
>I got burned by this problem...  I simply remember that it was a lot of
>debugging (hash table problems are generally difficult to debug since you have
>to follow a deep and complicated tree search).

I can refresh your memory. At that time I did some work with the following
position:

[D]8/p7/P5p1/7p/7P/4kpK1/8/8 w

When I showed it to you you said that crafty detected it was a mate in 5. In
fact white gets mated in 6. This was the symptom of the mate bug.

Greetings,
Steffen.




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