Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Tree reduction and search depth question

Author: Andrew Williams

Date: 02:37:06 08/10/01

Go up one level in this thread


On August 10, 2001 at 04:30:20, José Carlos wrote:

>  After completely rewriting my chess program (Averno), I've run into the
>null-move world, which I haddn't in old versions.
>  In old Averno I had:
>
>  -Reasonably good move ordering (hash move; good captures; killers; ...)
>  -Transposition table
>  -2 killers
>  -Lazy eval
>  -Check and recapture extension
>  -Some out-of-check stuff in qsearch
>
>  With that, I was searching 6-7 plies in blitz (in midgame) and 7-9 in
>standard. [Athlon 550]
>
>  I've read some open source programs to get a clue on how to search deeper, and
>now I have:
>
>  -Nullmove (tried R=3 and R=2, not yet R=2/3)
>  -Futility pruning
>  -Same move ordering as before
>  -Same hashing scheme
>  -Same 2 killers
>  -Same Lazy eval
>  -Check and null-threat extension
>  -No out-of-check stuff in qsearch
>
>  And now, I search 7-8 plies in blitz and 8-10 in standard (and the worst thing
>is that the program looks weaker than the old one!)
>  That looks like a poor search depth, isn't it? So what am I missing to get, as
>most null-movers, 12-13 in standard?
>  SEE? History heuristic for move ordering? ETC? Razoring?
>  Sorry for _answering_ instead of _trying_ but, as I have so little free time
>to work on my program, any advice would be appreciated.
>  As well, I'd like to know if, with the stuff I've implemented so far, I should
>expect a better performance. In that case, I might have a bug somewhere.
>
>  Thanks in advance,
>
>  José C.

Seriously, I think the first thing you should look at is move-ordering. I find
that errors I introduce here have an enormous impact on the depth of searches.
One metric that many people use is to see what proportion of beta cut-offs in
the search are achieved on the *first* move searched at a given node. The
higher this figure the better. Aim for over 90%.

Cheers

Andrew




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.